‘Western Australia cracks open your soul,” says Bill Bailey, and if you can’t imagine Joanna Lumley or Stephen Fry using quite that wording, that’s an indication that Bill Bailey’s Australian Adventure is subtly, rewardingly different to standard celebrity travelogues.
Bailey is spending all four instalments of his odyssey in Western Australia, a place with roughly the same population as Greater Manchester but in an area 2,000 times larger. You can fit 12 Great Britains into it and it’s on a par, size-wise, with western Europe. With so much raw nature and wide open space, you can be selective about who you mix with, which you suspect is how Bailey likes it.
As a travel presenter, he is more about place than people. Give him a tree, a statue or an old photograph to riff off and he is happy to use it as the basis for a lyrical musing. He visibly thrives in a region where he can be immersed in “nature unchallenged, untrammelled, unrestrained”, and “even the plants want to stab you”. Episode one, part one ends with him buying an Italian accordion from a secondhand shop in a small town, then using it to create a musical interlude to take us into the advert break: Bailey stands by himself in a wood, his new instrument emitting an eldritch drone.
Perfect advocate that he is for a starkly beautiful region, with its seemingly infinite world-class beaches and endless inland forest – this first instalment is based on and near the south coast, where the climate is Mediterranean, as opposed to the red, dusty outback farther north – Bailey is not usually alone. The format demands that he encounter people of supposed interest wherever he goes. It’s not that he is bad at these “I’m here to meet … ” sections where a ranger identifies her favourite trees, an Indigenous Australian elder fills us in on precolonial culture, or an Albany historian explains why they hate Perth; in fact, Bailey’s awkwardness means that there is no false bonhomie, which is probably an improvement. But it is obviously not his favourite part of the job.
It’s only when he makes it into an Albany bar that Bailey is moved to say: “I feel like I’m amongst my people.” He is there to meet the Albany Shantymen, who went viral during lockdown when the TikTok craze for sea shanties led internet users to their version of Soon May the Wellerman Come. They are hairy middle-aged men who enjoy dark ale and roaring singalongs: gnarly folk singing gnarly folk. One of the group likens their performances to apes hooting in unison to feel stronger, and Bailey is in his element on stage with them. He even startles some of the Shantymen with the ferocity he brings to Drunken Sailor, in a version with lyrics reflecting the town’s history as a whaling outpost: “BASTARD DRUNKEN WHALER!” You don’t get that with Michael Portillo.
As well as beery song and landscapes to get lost in, the far south of Western Australia seems to have plenty of the sort of eccentrics Bailey can do business with. A woman whose farm near Esperance features a lifesize replica of Stonehenge is good value, and Bailey knows a solstice-aligned giant trilithon when he sees one. He is soon communing with the henge: “There’s something lovely about putting your face against stone,” he says, doing just that.
He doesn’t, however, need ancient monuments, or Australian facsimiles of ancient monuments that were only built in 2008, to create an air of wistful strangeness. One scene is just him going to an ordinary coffee shop, but the cosiness of the wood burner they have prompts Bailey to daydream about giving it all up and moving to WA for good. On the way there, his breath misting against the dawn, he observes that the local crows’ extended caws make them sound “sarcastic”.
Before he moves north, Bailey leaves us with a sequence that is just him, a scruffy bloke who lives locally, and the fella’s dog, going for a swim in the clear, cold water off a stunning but deserted beach. Bailey’s new pal seems like just the sort of humble loner Western Australia offers a haven to – that he is actually the most famous man in the area, since his name is Luc Longley and he used to play basketball alongside Michael Jordan for the Chicago Bulls, doesn’t matter when he’s waist deep in the ocean, throwing a Frisbee to a dog. He has achieved what Bailey dreams of: a total escape.
• Bill Bailey’s Australian Adventure is on Channel 4 in the UK, and screens in Australia as Bill Bailey’s Wild West Australia on ABC from Thursday 16 November.
