THE GREAT YIN Why Billy Connolly is our most famous and best-loved funny man
From humble beginnings to international stardom, comedic genius Billy Connolly has worked his way into the heart of the nation, says Siobhan Synnot
Of all the relationships in Billy Connolly’s life, the longest and most electrifying has been with Scotland, a country he has loved and lambasted as only one of the family is allowed to do. Scotland, and in particular Glasgow, was where his first children were born, where he learned to play the banjo, where he served his apprenticeship as a welder and where he first performed in public.
It is Connolly who reminds Scotland of the collective misery of hiking up Loch Lomond, impersonating Glasgow drunks who walk like horses doing dressage, laughs at central belt entertainers who sing yearningly of Scotland as if they weren’t standing in the middle of it, and observes Aberdeen’s bitter micro-climate, where everyone gets the same Mohican hairstyle plastered to one side of your skull by the wind.
Widely regarded as our greatest comedian, he is also our most unwilling politician. ‘I do love Scotland, but if the love for your country is all you have, you’re in a desperate state,’ he once said. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum he declined all invitations to bang the drum for either side in an increasingly heated debate.
‘I don’t want to be one of these show-business guys telling people how to vote. It’s too important for anyone in show- business to put their oar in,’ he said at the time. ‘I have a much bigger regard for the Scottish people than that. It’s not Mel Gibson with stories of “Freedom!”’
However in the past he has frequently criticised Scottish independence and the nationalist movement. In 1999 he blamed the SNP for a perceived increase in antiEnglish racism in Scotland, and refused to attend the opening of the new Scottish Parliament, calling it a ‘wee pretend Parliament’.
Connolly even bashed the SNP’s most famous supporter, Sir Sean Connery, declaring that the actor, who lives in the Bahamas, ‘couldn’t find his way to Scotland in a taxi’.
More recently he dismissed devolution as divisive. ‘I don’t believe in having more layers of government that ordinary people will have to pay for,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time for people to get together, not split apart.’
Yet in a new book, Sir Billy admits he may rethink his attitude to independence, because he views the Brexit vote to leave the EU as a disaster.
‘The most important thing for Scotland is to keep our contact with Europe. Scots voted to stay in Europe, and if the only way for us to do that is to become independent from England, that may just be the way to go, and I never thought I’d say that,’ he writes in his newly-published memoir, Made In Scotland.
Connolly is a Scot who long ago declared his own independence by refusing to slot into any simple category. He is a happy family man who was abused as a child. A sociable loner. A man who unapologetically enjoys the trappings of wealth and celebrity that some have seen as a betrayal of his socialist roots. ‘There’s a lot of nonsense talked about me and money,’ he snorts. ‘I never have any. I’m useless with it. I earn it like a comedian and spend it like a welder. It just goes, you know? I’ve got kids and they’re very expensive. So’s my wife.’
His own childhood was one of raw poverty shared with his sister Florence. His father William was in Burma with the RAF when his mother Mamie abandoned her children and their Glasgow tenement to set up a new life in Argyll with another man. The children were passed on to William’s twenty- something sisters, Margaret and Mona, in Partick. The latter verbally and physically abused Billy, and it ended only when she was admitted to a psychiatric home. He was also bullied at school and picked on by a brutal schoolteacher who told him that Jesus was dead because of him.
When Pamela Stephenson’s biography of her husband came out in 2001 and revealed that Billy had also been molested between the ages of 10 and 15 by his father, it was a shock for his audiences, but Connolly and his wife had been working through the painful moments of his past for more than a decade. ‘He didn’t do that to me 24 hours a day, you know,’ says Connolly of his father, who died in 1989. ‘He was a nice guy sometimes. I loved him then and I love him now.’
He also found forgiveness for his mother, a teenage bride bringing up two toddlers unsupported. ‘I don’t like her much but I don’t blame her for going,’ he said later. ‘I don’t feel any malice; there was a war raging, she was young, living in a slum with two kids.’
Big sister Florence was his defender when they were growing up, and friends’ families also offered hope. ‘I’d go to their houses, and they were happy houses,’ he recalls. ‘I always knew that everything would be okay if I could just get out of this one, be an apprentice, get some money if I worked for wages, and get the hell out of there.’
In the shipyards as a teenage apprentice, things did improve. He found comradeship and good humour; when he first grew his trademark beard, his fellow welders nicknamed him Ho Chi Minh. He also bought his first banjo and formed a duo with a folk musician called Tam Harvey who he met in a pub in 1968. Connolly used to introduce their act with ‘We’re the Humblebums. I’m humble, and this is Tam Harvey…’
The gaps between songs became longer as Connolly’s introductions found a receptive audience but their new addition, a musician called Gerry Rafferty, grew exasperated and the act split up. Connolly embarked on a solo comedy career and by 1972 he had found local success with the Great Northern Welly Boot Show.
By 1975, he was selling out the Palladium. Albums like Cop Yer Whack For This started to appear in sitting room record collections. A master of the comic monologue, he already had a beady eye for detail, and a potent sense of the absurd, advising audiences to ‘never trust a man that can be left alone in a room with a tea cosy, without trying it on’.
When Scotland’s World Cup squad needed cheering up before the 1974 tournament, manager Willie Ormond invited him to Largs to gee them up with a private performance. And when his routine about the Last Supper being held in an East End Glasgow pub was picketed for blasphemy by the zealot Pastor Jack Glass, Connolly became a local hero.
Some of his boldness during that era was captured by Big Banana Feet, a documentary following him on a tour of Belfast and Dublin in 1975 when the Troubles kept other performers
“Never trust a man that can be left alone in a room with a tea cosy, without trying it on
away from Northern Ireland. Bearded, bell-bottomed and banana-shod, Connolly strode through a guard of squaddies onto the stage, and told the crowd he felt like Abraham Lincoln. Out of the darkness, a heckler bellowed ‘IRA’.
‘That’s really brave,’ said Connolly, dead-pan. ‘I’d love to see you do that at Ibrox.’
The year 1975 was when his career took off nationally and internationally. An appearance on Michael Parkinson’s late night chat show made him a UK sensation when 15 million viewers tuned in and saw him throw caution to the winds by telling the joke his manager begged to keep to himself: the one about the bloke who murders his wife, buries her, but leaves the bum sticking out. The punchline – ‘Well, I needed somewhere to park my bike’ – reduced Parky to tears.
The next four years he rose to stardom, with tours of the Middle East, Hong Kong and Australia, while his spoof of Tammy Wynette’s D.I.V.O.R.C.E topped the UK charts. But he was rarely at home.
Connolly had married Iris Pressagh in 1969. Now his success allowed them to exchange their Glasgow flat for an estate in Drymen with acres of land on Loch Lomondside for their children Cara and Jamie to play on. However both spouses began complaining of incompatible lives, and both were drinking heavily.
The Scottish press took a keen interest, with digs at his new wealth and fame. The Sunday Mail interviewed Connolly’s mother, Mamie, who revealed she’d seen her son three times in his life and none of them had been bonding experiences. The story was published on Mothers’ Day. When his marriage to Iris finally broke up in 1980, Not The Nine O’clock News comedian Pamela Stephenson made the front pages as Connolly’s constant companion on tour.
Relations with the Scottish press have never fully recovered, but his relationship with Stephenson saved his life. Years later he confessed, ‘I was on a downwards spiral and enjoying every second of it. Not only was I dying, but I was looking forward to it.’
Alcohol had been a rich seam of funny stories for him; on one occasion he was so drunk he couldn’t find his way out of a phone box and had to call his manager, who pointed out that
with only four sides, one with a phone, it was hardly Hampton Court Maze. But the less funny side included self-loathing, a cocaine habit and blackouts.
On his first night with Stephenson, he downed 30 brandies, and in their early years together, she both encouraged and threatened him until he finally went clean. She also helped mend some of the rifts in Connolly’s family. His body art includes a heart which is tattooed onto his left bicep with Pamela’s name inscribed: a sign of their steadfastness, although also a last minute idea when he forgot to buy her a birthday card. Alongside Jamie, now 49, and Cara, 45, his marriage to Pamela added three daughters: Daisy, 34, Amy, 32, and Scarlett, 30.
‘All my life my father told me I was stupid, and I have to constantly work at not believing it,’ said Connolly, who is also a grandfather to Cara’s children Walter and Barbara. ‘I’m determined not to have the same relationship with my own kids, so I’m constantly telling them they are clever and I never tell them they are bad. But we don’t bombard them with love. I mean, we’re not the Waltons.’
Connolly remains a complex and contradictory figure. In 1977 he turned down an invitation to appear at the Queen’s Jubilee Command Performance. ‘Can you imagine me on stage doing a heavy number and looking up at the royal box to see if she gives the royal approval for everyone to laugh?’ he said. ‘It’s not on.’
Forty years later, he accepted a knighthood, and has longstanding friendships with most of the royal family. William, Harry, Charles and Camilla all came to dinner at Candacraig House, the Aberdeenshire estate he owned for two decades, a stone’s throw from Balmoral. ‘What should I do when I’m asked to dine with the Queen?’ he once snapped. ‘Should I say “No, I can’t because I am working class and an anarchist?” I’d look like a prick. I am any man’s equal. I see myself as equal to Prince Charles.’
Connolly is also the proud Glaswegian who once said he would rather live ‘doon a stank in Govan’ than in America, and yet he has not lived in Glasgow since the 1970s. Instead, his chief bases have been a converted schoolhouse in Malta, as well as American properties in Los Angeles, New York and now Florida. So
“I pray that somewhere there’s some wee boy whose hero I am
what, he might retort: surely a man who cannot change his mind may be entirely incapable of change.
Even his famously inventive invective has mellowed. Fellow Glaswegian Armando Iannucci recalls meeting Connolly after the premiere of his feature film In The Loop. ‘He was very nice about the film,’ says Iannucci. ‘But he did say, “Oh my God, the swearing!” and I thought: “Yeah, but you’re Billy Connolly!”’
His riches, houses and famous friends are balanced by an accent unchanged by global success, fierce loyalty to his oldest pals, and quiet works of charity; an unsuspecting children’s home will suddenly find a refurbished room. Bereaved families discover funeral bills have disappeared.
There is also a hope that his story may inspire others. ‘I pray that somewhere there’s some wee boy whose hero I am. An ordinary wee guy off the pavement in some wee rotten place in the back of beyond who’ll look at me and say: “Well, Connolly did it. Left school wi’ sod all, wrote plays, appeared at Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, on the telly, in all the nice papers, the Sunday supplements and wowed ‘em. It can be done”.’
Connolly also developed a second string career as an actor, which blossomed when he played Queen Victoria’s devoted servant John Brown in 1997, and included notable highpoints working with Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai (2003), as a replacement for Albert Finney in Quartet (2012) and as the voice of King Fergus in Disney’s animated Scottish feature Brave (2012). ‘I’m a huge film star, but you have to hurry to the movies because I usually die in the first 15 minutes,’ he has noted. ‘I’m the only guy I know who died in a fucking muppet movie.’
In one week in 2013, he faced more serious warnings of mortality. On the Tuesday he was told he was going deaf; on the Wednesday he was given pills for heartburn that he’d need to take for the rest of his life; and on the Thursday he received the news that he had prostate cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
‘The guy who gave me the final diagnosis that I had Parkinson’s said it was incurable,’ he recalls. ‘I think that is terrible. He should have said we have yet to find a cure – leave me a little light on in the corner for Christ’s sake.’
He now wears hearing aids and had successful surgery to remove his prostate. ‘The thing that I find hardest about my Parkinson’s is coming to grips with the fact that it’s never going to go away,’ he writes. ‘Everything that has ever been wrong with me in the past always went away, eventually. It was either operated on or it cured itself. This isn’t going anywhere: in fact, it’s going to get worse.’
When his health issues were made public, the immediate outpouring of affectionate support from people in Scotland touched the entertainer enormously. ‘Some people greet me like we’re actually family. It’s like I’m a long-lost cousin. It would be churlish to complain about it,’ he remarked last year. ‘People seem to have got a bit frantic about me because of my Parkinson’s. For one thing there are big mural portraits of me up on walls all over Glasgow, to celebrate my 75th birthday. That left me flabbergasted. They are 50ft paintings by Rachel Maclean, Jack Vettriano and my old mate John Byrne and when I saw them I was stunned.
‘It had such a profound effect on me, that these genius people should have taken the time and gone to so much trouble for me. Before I saw them, I thought that I would be laughing and joking about them but they took my breath away.’
He has only played one comedy tour since he was diagnosed – and made his entrance to Jerry Lee Lewis’s Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On – but is set to return to television this winter with a new series, Coming Home, where Connolly takes audiences on a very personal tour of Scotland, and the places in his home country that mean the most to him.
In recent times, embracing the simplest pleasures have become increasingly important to Connolly. ‘There’s a joy that can come from just sitting in a room with your wife reading over there,’ he said in April this year. ‘You just check each other out now and again. Just a little click, I belong to you and you belong to me. You are safe, you are home.’