Aidan Smith: Still in awe of the Big Yin

Billy Connolly outside Buckingham Palace in 1974. He shot to fame with jokes about jobbies and the Crucifixion, which had previously been considered no-go areas. Picture: Getty Images

In the run-up Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games in 2014 the organisers got a famous son to do some cheerleading. But Billy Connolly didn’t think rabble-rousing or celebrity endorsement was really necessary. Set up a show in this city and the people will come, he said in the promotional film - any show at all.

The Big Yin waxed lyrical about Big Top-style fervour in the Glesca of his formative years for everything from the evangelist Billy Graham to health awareness drives for tuberculosis. “Folk will turn out for a flittin’, they’ll follow fire engines,” he laughed. “This is the only city where you’ll ask directions of a bloke who’s walking the other way and he’ll say: ‘I’m going there, too! I’ll come with you!’ Then he’ll about-turn and you’ll head off together, probably stopping somewhere for a pint.”

I can’t help wondering what the demand would be like if Connolly was to announce a last-ever stand-up tour. Britain’s greatest-living funnyman is not sure when he’ll next turn up on stage, even if he’ll do it again. He’s at the mercy of Parkinson’s, the progressive neurological condition first diagnosed three and a half years ago. “Aye well,” he said of the prospects of any more gigs in an interview the other day. “I’ll have to see how this medicine works out.”

No more Billy? What a tragedy that would be. He’s trying to stay upbeat as he fights his physical decline in Florida, having moved there from New York in the hope the warmth of the sun would help - and while he’s become ever-more dependent on his wife Pamela Stephenson he says a sense of humour is absolutely essential.

“It’s the only thing that gets you through,” he admitted. “I’m trying to stay on the light side because the dark side is unthinkable.” He shakes uncontrollably down the left side of his body. His response? “I play the song Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On to stick two fingers up to it.” He may be desperately trying to avoid the dark side now but in his humour he’s never shied away from mentioning the unmentionable: “I’ve got Parkinson’s disease. And I wish to f*** he’d kept it to himself.”

These last quips are from tonight’s ITV special, Billy Connolly & Me: A Celebration, in which the great and the good line up to sing the Big Yin’s praises. We shouldn’t need reminding of his talent. If you think there’s a funnier man out there then I’d like to hear your nominations and, chortlingly, your justifications. But then it’s true that we can’t all have been at the best and most impressionable age when he hit an unsuspecting world with The Jobby Wheecher.

In truth I was already possibly a bit old for toilet humour but this was sensational. Jobbies (or is it jobbys?) went from being undiscussable to legitimised to hilarious to having an apotheosis in one quick wheech. Soon after I came to realise that Connolly making jokes about the Crucifixion was even more sensational.

Connolly legitimised the Glasgow native, giving him an apotheosis as well. I can see the Big Yin on stage impersonating one of these bunneted self-taught intellectuals after drink has been taken. One foot is moored to the floor while the fellow makes several attempts to move forward, planting the other foot randomly, and only succeeding in going round in an increasingly unsteady circle. Now, burdened by Parkinson’s, he’s admitted: “I walk like a drunk man.”

There were comedians before Connolly who’d mined the Scottish condition for gags but they’d been around for a bit, some of them going all the way back to variety, and by the time the Big Yin came along with his wild hair, fraying denims and roaring delivery, they seemed camp and hammy. Connolly was punk-rock before music had undergone its revolution. And Michael Parkinson put him on Saturday night primetime! Incredible.

I’ve been in the same room as Connolly on three occasions, all of them in Edinburgh. The first was during the Festival Fringe, in a bar where women drooled at the sex symbol in their midst, something he couldn’t have contemplated as a banjo-plucking member of the Humblebums. The second was in the loos of the old Traverse Theatre. Connolly had just revealed his acting chops in Peter McDougall’s Play for Today Just Another Saturday and I decided to show off to a pal by quoting one of the Big Yin’s lines back at him while he was minding his own business at the urinal. “You’ll need to save up your Embassy coupons for a Daktari gun,” I slavered. What a berk. But like those women I was in awe.

The third occasion was at the Usher Hall three years ago - not long after his “funny week” when he was prescribed a hearing aid and pills for heartburn and told on the same day he had prostate cancer and Parkinson’s - when he was thrilled to be on football duty, making the draw for the Scottish Cup. The draw had been on his bucket list - “What a lovely thing,” he remarked. Its solemn roll-call of Montrose, Ayr, Nairn and the rest will have chimed with him, recalling folkie tours before the big breakthrough with that joke about a handy spot to park a bicycle. “I hope I can get away with this one - it’s a beauty,” he’d said to Parkinson before his tale of casual murder, then pausing to explain: “A close in Scotland is the entrance to a tenement.”

After that unfortunate business in the cludgies, it was a joy to be able to spend an afternoon with him, to get an insight into how his whirring, whimsical mind works, how he’s located the comedy in the ordinary, optimistic Scot and is now finding laughs in the darkness. I really hope he can get back on his bicycle.