With a humour forged from poverty, he made the world throw back its head and laugh
WHEN a young Billy Connolly was on his way to the BBC television studios for his now-celebrated debut appearance on Michael Parkinson’s chat show, his manager warned him not to tell the story about the man who killed his wife.
After all, Parky’s was the only talk show in town in the 1970s with a loyal audience of around 20million.
One good night could make his career – one off-colour joke could break it. Telling it was a high-risk strategy. Squeaky bum time, you might say.
‘But it was a great joke and the interview was going so well,’ recalled Connolly of that seminal 1975 interview in which his sole aim had been to make his name beyond his native Scotland.
When he mentioned the man burying his wife bottom-up so that he would have somewhere to park his bike, he achieved his objective there and then.
The ‘bike joke’ remains the highlight of a chat show interview which Connolly readily admitted ‘changed my entire life’.
Five decades on, it is fair to say Connolly’s contribution to British comedy goes well beyond bottom jokes. Many younger comedians consider him the godfather of modern stand-up for his richly observational and often labyrinthine routines.
Now in his 75th year The Big Yin, a kind of scatological national treasure, is set to receive the entertainer’s ultimate accolade of a knighthood for services to reducing global audiences to tears of helpless laughter.
Not bad for a child of the Glasgow slums, who used his gift of humour to joke his way out of the Govan shipyards and into the rarefied world of the celebrity jet-set.
From humble beginnings, Connolly’s ready wit has earned him international fame and fortune, the chance to star in film and television and to buy a Highland castle where he would entertain Hollywood A-list friends such as fellow comedian Robin Williams.
More recently, the focus has been far more on the general state of his failing health. Nearly four years ago, his agent revealed that Connolly had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and the ‘initial symptoms’ of Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative condition causing muscle stiffness and shaking.
The star underwent successful surgery for the cancer but the Parkinson’s continues to strengthen its grip. Yet despite the bleak prognosis, there seems little sign of Connolly ever letting up.
Indeed, having recently completed a sell-out world tour to mostly rave
reviews, this septuagenarian with flowing, white locks and goatee, new tattoos and uncontrollable tremors recently vowed to ‘just keep doing it until I die’. He has always been a Scottish folk hero, someone who overcame a difficult start before stumbling into stardom. Born in 1942 and raised in a cramped Partick tenement, he was abandoned by his mother Mary when he was four. His RAF technician father William, on his return from the Second World War, sexually abused him until he was 15. Young Billy did a five-year welding apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards, with the experience forging him and his sense of humour, while the hardship of his Scottish upbringing provided much of the material for his early and most celebrated routines. In his spare time he was a folk singer, finding fame playing banjo with the late Gerry Rafferty in The Humblebums. He would tell little stories to fill the breaks, until the stories got longer and Rafferty gently suggested his true gift lay outside music. Connolly’s unerring instinct for the outrageously funny made the switch to comedy full-time an instant success. He even made the charts with novelty songs, including parodies of Tammy Wynette’s song D.I.V.O.R.C.E. and the Village People’s In the Navy, renamed In the Brownies. The banana-shaped boots he wore onstage in those early days remain on display in Glasgow’s People’s Palace museum.
But behind the scenes, his private life was unravelling in a haze of alcoholism and substance abuse. His first marriage to Iris, with whom he had two children Jamie, now 47, and Cara, 43, was falling apart.
IN 1979, he met former Not The Nine O’Clock News star turned clinical psychologist Pamela Stephenson when he made a cameo appearance on the BBC comedy show. They soon began an affair and later married, producing three daughters.
Connolly credits her with helping him reach middle age after she gave him a stark choice – the drink or her. He once said: ‘Marriage to Pam, it didn’t change me. It’s saved me.’
Newly sober in his 50s, his celebrity offered considerable room for diversification. Starring roles in films such as 1997’s Mrs Brown, and Down Among The Big Boys revealed him to be a talented actor, while his World Tour travelogue series painted him largely as an engaging and likeable eccentric. This, after all is a man, who has stripped naked on television more than once, who had his nipples pierced for his 50th birthday and dyed his goatee beard purple for his 60th.
But he has had to address the limitations Parkinson’s places on him. In 2013, he sold his beloved Scottish home at Candacraig, in Aberdeenshire, and relocated from New York to Florida where he hopes the warmer climate will help his symptoms.
Today, Connolly suffers from deafness, cannot play his banjo well and has had to have speech therapy after Parkinson’s started to affect his voice.
He appears increasingly frail but that spark of humour is never far away. Walking on stage to warm applause on his 2014 stand-up tour, he told the audience: ‘You’re only doing that because I’m not well.’