Aidan Smith on Sir Big Yin and the sculptor’s biggest challenge

Statues ain’t what they used to be says Aidan Smith, who worries what one of Billy Connolly might look like

Today I’m bathing in the reflected glory of my wee sister’s OBE for services to nursing and, emboldened by the award, reckon I can get jobby wheecher into print for the second time in three months.

I’m writing about Billy Connolly again because right now as he battles degenerative illness we shouldn’t need much excuse to do this and his knighthood in the same Queen’s Birthday Honours is a good enough reason, as are the spectacular gable-end portraits just unveiled in his home city … but a statue? I’m not so sure about that.

Glasgow wants to honour the comedian who made his name mentioning the previously unmentionable – jet-propelled cludgie disposal, the crucifixion – with his likeness in stone. I mean, the sentiment’s a good one, but can we be certain the statue would be?

Trousers. That’s modern day statuary’s big problem. The broadcaster Danny Baker was among the first to notice this and he’s right. If the subject wears trousers – and you don’t see as many long, flowing robes on men anymore – then in statue form they invariably end up resembling robotic versions of themselves.

Give a sculptor a gown or a cape and he can signify nobleness and intellect. Give the stone-carver muscly calves, ideally astride a horse, and he can convey courage and heroism. Dull, motionless trousers must be a nightmare. All statues are by their nature motionless, of course, but expert chiselling can’t do much with a pair of strides and more than once my youngest daughter has gazed up at a statue of recent vintage and remarked: “I’ve got a Playmobil man just like that.”

Is the chiselling still expert? I’m giving its practitioners the benefit of the doubt here because when I look at the bust of the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo I think of a description the world’s most vain sportsman wouldn’t understand although he’d be appalled if he did – glaikit.

Footballers, indeed, have fared particularly badly at the hands of sculptors in the past few years. Denis Law doesn’t much resemble Denis Law and Billy Bremner looks even less like Billy Bremner. Recently I met a contemporary of that pair, the Celtic legend Bobby Lennox, who’s soon to be cast in stone in his home town of Saltcoats. He has mixed feelings about the installation. It’s an honour, of course, but at the same time “awfie embarrassing”. He told me: “This is such a small place and it’ll be very difficult to avoid bumping into myself.”

To be fair to the chisellers, we’re a hyper-critical audience, being assailed by images of likely statue subjects daily and in many forms. We all know what Ronaldo looks like – even our unborn children have a pretty good idea – and can make an immediate, informed assessment of any artistic representation of him. But who really knew what, say, the Duke of Wellington looked like when he was in his Waterloo pomp and, if they were alive today, could swear that his statue at the east end of Edinburgh’s Princes Street captures him perfectly?

In a simpler age and a more reverential one, you imagine that unveilings of statues were greeted with universal awe. The most recent statues erected in my neighbourhood in the capital’s Stockbridge were Antony Gormley cast-iron figures, in the Water of Leith. I loved them being there, but