Some like it Scot!
Comedy legend Sir Billy Connolly reveals his thoughts on his childhood, being Scottish plus wearing kilts and tartan...
Sir Billy Connolly gives his hilarious take on Scottish Pride, Good Food and Bad Habits and Revolutions in the third outing of his series Billy Connolly Does, which intertwines anecdotes from his life with stand-up from the TV archives.
The first episode sees the ‘Big Yin’ talk about what it really means to be Scottish, with musings on everything from bagpipes and tartan, to midges and even his stint as a kilt-wearing Angus Mcsporran on the children’s TV show Super Gran! ‘Scottish pride is getting bigger,’ says Sir Billy, now 81.
‘When I grew up, the kilt was a joke. If you saw a guy in a kilt when you were a little boy, you’d shout, “Kilty, kilty cold bum!” You’d no more get married in a kilt, than get married in a bloody parachute. Tartan is really for hunting on the hill in camouflage.
‘The tribes wore tweedy colours, and they’d hunt deer. But with tartans today, the deer would go, what’s that yellow and pink thing climbing up the hill?’
On the Clyde
There are also some classic stand-up routines of Sir Billy talking about his time working on the shipyards in Glasgow and how he used to take family holidays on the River Clyde! ‘The Clyde to me is a wonderful place. I spent a lot of childhood holidays there,’ he says. ‘In fact, there isn’t a family in Glasgow that doesn’t have a picture of their children standing in raincoats on the Clyde. It’s the only place I know where, in holiday photographs, you’ve got raincoats on. The beaches used to be crowded but today people go, “It’s too cold, it’s too windy, I’m not going there!”’