BILLY CONNOLLY:
At 76, Billy Connolly has made peace with his tough Glasgow childhood and found happiness and a suntan on a Florida beach. William Langley catches up with the Scottish funnyman and finds Parkinson’s has not even begun to quench his spirit.
finding peace through forgiveness and comedy
Before there was Billy Connolly, the hairy, banjoplaying welder from the Glasgow shipyards, there was an entirely different Billy Connolly. This one was a small, scared, slum-child, curled up on the floor of his local library, devouring tales of faraway lands and terrifying creatures that come for you in the night. Little Billy would spend as much time as he could among books, partly because going home to the grim tenement building he lived in would mean being whacked around by Margaret and Mona, the aunts he remembers as more frightening than anything in fiction.
“Aye, it was bad,” he scowls, “but it was the books that got me out of that life. They were my ticket to the world. The library was my escape tunnel. Reading showed me there was something better, something other out there.” For all his later success as a comedian, Billy the bookworm is still very much with us, and at the age of 76, has produced a first volume of his own work: Tall Tales and Wee Stories, a kind of “greatest hits” collection of his most famous stage routines, subtly tweaked and polished until, as Billy says, “I hope you’ll hear my voice in your head while you’re reading it.”
Six years ago, while living in New York, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a neurological condition that has slowed him down to the point where he can no longer do live shows. “Arrh, there’s no point complaining about it,” he says. “The thing’s progressive, and there’s not much anyone can do. I couldn’t handle two hours on stage, and I didn’t want to end up as one of those guys everyone says should have quit years ago.”
He misses his audiences, though, and began to wonder if there was another way he could reach them. “I never worked from scripts, never had anything prepared in advance,” he says. “My way was to go out there with a few odd words jotted down – ‘shampoo’, ‘scrotum’, something stupid like that – and just start talking and see where it went.”
The idea of the book was to preserve these inventive, anarchic monologues in something close to standard form, although, as Billy rather guiltily admits, it has been necessary to thin out the swearing. Slightly. “I’ve been called the greatest swearer in history,” he says, with a puff of pride, “but you’ve got to be good at it, and know how to use it, and what works on stage doesn’t necessarily work in a book.”
The hair is shorter now, and snowy white, topping off a jet-black ensemble of T-shirt, leggings and sneakers that appear to be decorated with Liquorice Allsorts. Whatever his ailments, he seems remarkably upbeat over tea and biscuits in a London hotel, his complexion smoothed by the sunshine of Florida, where he now lives, and such grumps as he has tend to be about hearing loss and struggling to get his socks on.
Billy’s comedy grew out of the gritty fatalism of the streets of his Scottish home city, where, he says, men learned to make each other laugh because the alternative was despair. “Being the funny guy was a kind of device you used to distract attention away from how terrible your life was. Glasgow was like that – full of funny people. It’s simply a fact of life that where the living is hard, the comedy’s good.” On this basis, Billy looked purpose-built for success. He was born on the kitchen floor of a tiny Glasgow apartment in 1942, while his father, William Connolly, was serving with the British army in Burma. When he was three, his teenage mother, Mary, met another man and walked out, leaving Billy and his older sister, Florence, in the reluctant hands of their two aunts.
Billy would only see his mother a handful of times after this. He recalls that he didn’t feel any bond with her, and she didn’t seem to feel any with him. Life failed to improve when his father returned from the war, a virtual stranger to his children. In the cramped apartment, William Snr and his son shared a sofa bed, and Billy says he was often sexually abused. It took him many years of hiding to come to terms with what he calls these “abandonment issues”, only really addressing them after meeting the woman he salutes as “the Supreme Goddess and Empress of Everything”, Pamela Stephenson, the New Zealand-born actress, author and therapist, who he first encountered on a British TV show at the height of his drinking days. Having pulled off the superhuman feat of sobering her new boyfriend up, Pamela began digging into his psyche, unearthing the hidden traumas and insecurities that had been festering there since childhood.
“I’d assumed that, when my mother and father died, all those bad feelings would go away,” he says, “but they actually got worse, and I was being haunted by them. The problem was that I had never confronted or reconciled myself to what had happened. It’s only with help from Pamela and a few other people that I’ve been able to indulge in forgiveness, and
I’m happy with it all now.” The turning point came, he says, when he stopped feeling sorry for himself. “That’s the only way to deal with it. I am amazed when I see on the TV some child who has been abused, and the adult with the child will say: ‘His life has been ruined,’ and I think, ‘Says who?’ You’re telling a child his life is ruined, and that’s his starter for 10?’ No, the right way is to get that bag of bricks off your back and walk away, and the best way to do that is through forgiveness.”
Pamela, 69, who he married in 1989 and has three children with, almost certainly understands Billy better than anyone else alive, but still portrays him in her best-selling biography of her husband as a strange, emotionally rootless enigma, both lovable and disturbing to live with. She tells of his terrible, thrashing nightmares that forced her to build a “Berlin Wall” of pillows around herself when they first shared a bed.
I once asked her if she had ever fathomed what made their marriage work, and she said: “No, I’ll never get to the bottom of that. He’s still a mystery to me, and I to him. But I’m still always looking for answers. Part of what you have to do, in a relationship like mine, where you fall in love with a man as
“It’s a fact of life that where the living’s hard, the comedy’s good.”
unusual as Billy, is to look at yourself as well as him, and try to understand why you should be attracted to such a person.”
Certainly, marriage to Pamela (who starred in the 1970s Australian TV series Ryan before making her name on the UK comedy hit Not the Nine O’Clock News) appears to have softened Billy’s once harsh assessment of the world he grew up in. “In many ways it was a lovely place,” he says. “The old tenements, everyone knew each other, looked out for each other. I remember when I was a really wee boy, and I saw Mrs Smith, who worked at the greengrocer’s and wore a big surgical boot, coming down the street, and she yelled out: ‘Billy Connolly, come here!’ And she gave me this huge hug, pulling me right up against her bosom, and then she said: ‘Ye mammy’s ran away and left ye, but dinnae worry, son, ye’ll be all right here.’ And I remember suddenly feeling all warm and happy. They were the best people to live among.”
He left school at 15, found a job as a trainee welder in a Clyde shipyard, taught himself to play the banjo and was soon singing and performing impromptu comedy routines in pubs. As his renown grew, he found he could make a living as what he calls “a patter merchant”, quit the yards and married a local girl, Iris Pressagh, with whom he had two children. Then in 1975 he was invited onto Britain’s most popular chat show, hosted by Michael Parkinson. His appearance caused a sensation, and his career took off.
Billy’s stroke of genius was to take an essentially local strain of humour and make it sellable all over the world, sometimes to audiences made up of people who would struggle to find Scotland on the map. The success brought him acclaim, wealth, Hollywood stardom, a knighthood and hosts of awards.
Australia occupies a special place in his heart. “We have quite a lot in common, the Scots and the Aussies.” A film of his final Australian performance, recorded in Sydney in 2015, will be screened in New Zealand cinemas on
October 18-20, along with a new interview.
Comedy has changed a lot since the “Big Yin”, as he’s sometimes known in his homeland, first hit the boards in the mid-1960s, but he doesn’t subscribe to the view that political correctness (PC) and the proclivity for offence-taking have defanged the trade. “Comedy’s always changing,” he says. “It’s changing as we speak. When I come back to Britain I’m really impressed by the acts I see. In a way, we had it easy, we could make jokes about anything… homosexuals, mothersin-law, foreigners, but I think the world has changed for the better and comedy has changed for the better with it. Some people say, to hell with PC, you should be able to joke about anything, but it’s not really more difficult to be funny now, you just have to be funny in different ways.”
Tomorrow, he perkily tells me, he’s heading back to Glasgow, which has also changed a lot. With high unemployment, stubborn poverty and the lowest life expectancy in Europe, his hometown is still
“I’d just like to be remembered as a funny guy.”
statistically a tough place, but the notorious tenements have been flattened, gentrification is creeping in, and new museums, theatres and art galleries feed a thriving cultural scene. Billy isn’t sure what to make of it. “The old places are all gone,” he winces. “There are actually trees now in the street where I was brought up. There were no trees back then. The wee school I went to is now nice apartments, with [he appears ready to choke up] brass handrails! It’s all very middle class. Unrecognisable.”
Happily, though, the library is still there, a fine Edwardian pile, just a short dash across the tramlines from Billy’s old home in the Partick district of the city. “Oh, those books,” he sighs. “I was obsessed with Seven Years in Tibet, and those Jack London stories about the Yukon – White Fang – the wolves’ eyes around the campfire… There’s nothing like books.”
He knows his time is running out, and says he might yet return home. He wants to be buried on the shores of beautiful Loch Lomond in the Trossachs Hills north of Glasgow, and will ask for little in the way of tributes. “I’d just like to be remembered as a funny guy,” he says. “And that I was fair, and didn’t have victims.” AWW