The desire politician to be a should bar you from being one
class or being Scottish define him throughout his career.
The dad of five, who was immortalised in an exhibition at Glasgow’s People’s Palace when he was just 32, said: “It’s all about never letting yourself be put into a box marked ‘working class’ or ‘Scottish’ or anything else that limits who you are or what you can say.
“When you are part of a nation of five million people, you can very quickly become a professional Scot. It’s the easiest trap in the world and it can happen not only to comedians and singers but to writers and artists.
“You become a Scottish artist as opposed to an artist. I suppose it is the same when you are Welsh or Irish. “It doesn’t seem to happen to the
English. No one ever says ‘that English artist’ or ‘that English comedian’. The accent gives you this incredibly strong identity.
“I am Scottish but that’s not all I am and I hate all that tartan b ***** ks.
“When I did the London Palladium, I had a Harry Lauder cut-out which I stuck my head through and then it got whisked away and revealed me standing there in my polka-dot suit and I said, ‘I come to bury Lauder not to praise him.’” Billy added: “I hate the class system. “I come from a Scotland where people go to work and they are proud. They go about their business and life like normal people, they don’t care about their father before them and all that bull **** .
“There is comfort in knowing there are people beneath you. It’s a pathetic affair. I’ve never really felt like that myself. Coming from an immigrant family from Ireland has boxed it into me I should not feel like that. I’ve never had the temptation. It’s an irrelevance.” illy said: “I will never forget when class dawned on me – I was a Cub Scout and we used to do ‘bob a job’ week once a year.
“I lived down in Partick and I went up to the Highburgh Road and knocked on doors.
“They were very good and would let me polish their shoes and give me a bob and then a woman asked me to go down and get her some anthracite. I thought what the f*** was that?
“I went down to the basement and all I could see was coal. I remember thinking, ‘They even have different names for coal up here. They are different from us.’”
The stand-up said it’s the middle class who annoy him the most. He said: “The proper serious upper class are all f ***** g nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all f ***** g nuts and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks.
“When I lived in Drymen, I used to drink in a wee pub called the Clachan Inn. In Drymen you had some serious money, like Sir Hugh Fraser who owned Harrods for f*** sake, and you had folk who lived in council houses.
“What I found when I was in the pub was the rich and the successful from millionaires’ row mixed very easily with the council house people – and it was the V-necked jumper Volvo mob who had the problem. They wondered why
Sir Hugh Fraser and Billy were talking to them f ***** g scrubbers.”
Billy added: “As I got more famous, I got invited to posh dinners and I would turn up and have a good laugh but I never wanted to be part of it. It’s just not my cup of tea.
“I had dinner with Ronald Reagan one night in Hollywood. Reagan was at my table and Bette Midler was there. It was the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me.
“He said, ‘Bill, I had the pleasure of addressing your government last month and I have never seen anything like the…’, and he just sat there in silence and didn’t say a word more.
“It was as if the wires had come apart. I thought, ‘F***, he is a loony.’” ●Billy and Us is on BBC Scotland tonight at 10pm.