COMEDIAN Bill Bailey returned to Bournemouth last night with his latest baffling show, Qualmpeddler.

More stream of consciousness than well-plotted performance – and that’s no criticism – the show took in everything from politics to One Direction via the Danish language and cutting sellotape off a cross owl.

Bailey, perhaps best-known for his performance as Manny in Channel 4’s Black Books, takes mundane situations and finds the extraordinary in them.

Starting with the problematic badger cull, he then plunges headlong into the failures of the coalition government, taking aim at Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.

This seemed almost like a waste of his comedian talents, as did a lengthy section on how dim Celebrity Big Brother winner Chantelle Houghton is.

But the tempo of the show noticeably stepped up a gear the moment he took to his keyboard.

A reggae/dub-step version of Downton Abbey was mind-bendingly surreal and absolutely hilarious, as was the Match of the Day theme tune reinvented as a Jewish folk song.

The mnemonic device for remembering the points of the compass – never eat shredded wheat – was another bizarre highlight, with the words set to death metal music and sung in a Rammstein-style roar.

There were certainly weaker moments in this wordy ramble through the corners of Bailey’s mind, but with such a huge range of topics on the go, you couldn’t help but leave the BIC with a smile.