Bill Bailey: Qualmpeddler, Assembly Rooms, Derby, review It's a bit beastly of Bill Bailey to open his latest live comedy show with a barbed send-off to Margaret Thatcher. Standing at one of his synthesizer keyboards, the bearded loon warbles a rewrite of Candle in the Wind that begins with the line "Goodbye Mrs T, though I never much liked you at all, I can see how some were taken in by your toxic intransigence." It continues in the same vein, building to a point-scoring climax ("You can sell off pretty much anything in your life, but this is our National Health") that in Derby elicits an inevitable round of self-righteous applause. These days some comedians can allow rape and child abuse as subjects of mirth - but anyone who touches the NHS is damned forever. Has the 49-year-old West Country hippie gone all Sid Vicious on us? Yes, he has some foul things to say about the Coalition - and his material on Cameron is pure contempt. But he's witty with it, and sage, too. His summation of Ed Miliband - "He looks like a man who has caught a bouquet at a funeral" - is memorably apt, and it's hard to disagree with his assessment that we're being ruled by "a black hole, a question mark and a parsnip," that oddball pay-off confirming that Bailey continues to plough his own surreal furrow through the baffling confusions of our age. All in all, he's his usual bright, avuncular, laid-back and musically talented self - happy enough to bounce off the audience at length after suggesting that the otherwise derided celebrity Chantelle Houghton had a point when she observed that there's no single word for the top area of your foot. His taste for whimsy is everywhere apparent (down to the lovely hallucinogenic detail of the set) but this feels like a tighter, more focused affair than 2010"s curiously inconsequential Dandelion Mind. There's a welcome satirical sting to some of his "mash-up" sonic experiments, too - he lends a defiant reggae lilt to the Downton Abbey theme tune and pumps subversive dubstep into a conjectured Church of England promo video. He even hits a poignant note towards the end by retelling the grisly story of how he rescued a hapless Eurasian eagle owl from certain consumption in a Beijing restaurant last year. There are some very strange things going on in the world right now, this show leaves you thinking, that outstrip anything Bailey's unfettered imagination can conceive.