Sir Billy on love, family, art and life after the stage
WHAT a difference an interviewer makes. Send a journalist to quiz Scots comic legend Sir Billy Connolly and he has been known to react like Superman handed giftwrapped Kryptonite.
But dispatch a cultural historian and a new portrait of the 75-year-old emerges as he happily opens up about life, love, and his hopes for after he is gone.
Last night, in a Sky Arts documentary, Tate Britain’s Great Art Walks, Sir Billy joined curator Gus Casely-hayford to retrace the steps of Berkshire-born painter Sir Stanley Spencer.
Spencer’s paintings of ordinary people in biblical scenarios, such as The Resurrection, Cookham, in which the dead rise again to greet ecstatic loved ones, were initially dismissed by critics as naive. They have since been acclaimed as masterpieces and Spencer, born in 1891, hailed as a giant of modern British art.
Asked about his own art, exhibited at the People’s Palace in Glasgow in 2015, Connolly said: “I draw after a fashion. I make shapes and I get away with murder because I’m famous. But I love doing it because I was told as a schoolboy I couldn’t. Like so many things.”
Besides looking at his paintings, the documentary charted Spencer’s complicated relationships with women, including divorcing his first wife, Hilda, with whom he had two daughters, to wed a woman who was gay. Connolly has been married to his second wife, psychologist Pamela Stephenson, for 29 years.
Spencer spent the rest of his life regretting his midlife crisis. Connolly joked that he had one too, but did not find out until the press reported it was over.
“I had been divorced from my first wife and moved in with a second wife and got a sports car. A red one.”
When the Second World War broke out, Spencer was sent to the Clyde shipyards as artist in residence. Connolly recalled his own time in the yards as a welder.
“It was noisy and rough and great. We were so profane. It was like being in jail when the gate closes and you are all together. Believe it or not we were called the erection squad. We put the superstructure on the ship.”
What would the shipyard workers have made of Spencer, asked Casely-hayford.
“They would have loved him. They would have mercilessly taken the p***, but that’s just part of the gig.”
Connolly left the shipyards half a century ago, but his time there remains important to him.
“Since I got the knighthood a lot of people have said to me, ‘My, you’ve come a long way’. It doesn’t feel like a long way to me because part of me is still there. I’m a working man. Put in a good day’s work for a good day’s pay. I’ve often considered myself a welder who got away with it.”
Spencer’s portraits of happy times with Hilda prompted Connolly to reflect on the importance of family.
“Especially if you have a life like mine where you appear in front of thousands of people, spotlights, applause. When you are alone it dawns on you that it’s nothing. That all there is really is love and friendship. Everything else is soluble.”
Connolly had surgery for prostate cancer in 2013, the same year it was announced the father-of-five and grandfather had Parkinson’s. The simple things in life have become increasingly important, he said.
“There’s a joy that can come from just sitting in a room with your wife reading over there and you over here doing whatever it is, playing your banjo.
“You just check each other out now and again. Just a little click, I belong to you and you belong to me. You are lucky enough to have had a taste of the rest. They are okay but they are not ‘it’. It is just a glance from someone else that assures you that you are okay. You are safe, you are home.”
The final visit in the programme was to the Cookham graveyard where, in 1959, Spencer was finally reunited with Hilda.
The comedian who once caused outrage with his attacks on religion has not mellowed in his belief that when he dies, that is it, show over.
“I have always thought that eternal life was being well thought of when you’re gone,” said Connolly. “That means a lot to me. That’s all there is, but that’s plenty.”
I draw. I get away with murder because I’m famous