Billy Connolly: Forgotten film of Scottish comedian shot in Dublin and Belfast set for revival thanks to £50 eBay purchase

Fly-on-the-wall film following Billy Connolly shows the Scottish comic on tour in Dublin and Belfast

It is an intimate portrait of one of Scotland’s best-known performers coming to terms with the reality of his new-found fame.

But few fans of Sir Billy Connolly have had the chance to see a fly-on-the-wall film following the comic on tour to Dublin and Belfast for some of his earliest stand-up shows nearly half a century ago – until now.

Painstaking restoration work on one of only two surviving prints of the 1975 documentary, made by Murray Grigor and Patrick Higson, has paved the way for it to return to cinemas and the homes of The Big Yin’s followers after it was spotted for sale on eBay for £50.

The newly-restored Billy Connolly documentary Big Banana Feet will be shown at Glasgow Film Festival on 3 March ahead of a selected cinema release and a release on Blu-ray/DVD in May.

Partly inspired by the 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, Big Banana Feet shows the Glasgow comic nervously preparing to go on stage, navigating the political tensions of the Troubles, handling hecklers and responding to critics of his on-stage swearing.

Big Banana Feet, which will be shown at the Glasgow Film Festival next month ahead of a cinema and Blu-ray/DVD release, also explores how Connolly’s popularity exploded after his first appearance on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 1975 and the surge in media attention that came with it.

Grigor, a former Edinburgh International Film Festival director who has made around 50 films, left the only other surviving print of Big Banana Feet with an American film archive while travelling in the US because his suitcase was too heavy.

Grigor, who will speak about the documentary after its Glasgow screening on March 3, told The Scotsman: “We had shown the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back at the festival before I met Billy. In a way, we followed the format and slightly plagiarised it with Big Banana Feet.

The newly-restored Billy Connolly documentary Big Banana Feet will be shown at Glasgow Film Festival on 3 March ahead of a selected cinema release and a release on Blu-ray/DVD in May.

“I first saw Billy perform with The Humblebums in Comrie. He had amazing repartee between numbers. The Great Northern Welly Boot Show at the Fringe, which was extraordinary – it was in a 600-seater venue, which was completely packed out. They had a power cut and he performed on his own for about 40 minutes. You could see that he could go on forever.”

Grigor and Higson got agreement from Connolly to make the documentary after pitching the idea to him in a meeting at the Tennent’s Bar, on Byres Road, in Glasgow.

Grigor said: “We made it for £10,000. It was a joy to do as he was really just getting going as a comedian at the time. You can really see him gaining confidence.

“We hoped to sell it to the BBC, but they wanted us to cut it back to under half an hour, take a lot of the dirty bits and politics out of it, and clean it up. But I didn’t want to do that. I thought we should see how long we could stretch it to and it ended up running for 80 minutes. I knew that it could say a lot more if it was made for cinema."

The newly-restored Billy Connolly documentary Big Banana Feet will be shown at Glasgow Film Festival on 3 March ahead of a selected cinema release and a release on Blu-ray/DVD in May.

Douglas Weir, technical producer at the BFI, who has overseen the restoration, said: “Big Banana Feet was on a list of films that I always wanted to find, restore and preserve. Only a few prints would have been made when it was released as it was a low-budget documentary.

“I stumbled across a 16mm print on eBay and bought it for fifty quid. I couldn’t believe my luck. This is the only other copy apart from the one that’s been in America since the 1970s. It’s taken four years to fully reconstruct and restore it. But we can make new copies very easily now.

“It was made just when Billy was on the cusp of becoming a megastar. The best bit in the whole film is a section where he is about to go on stage in Belfast and you can see he is nervous. He is sitting on his own having a beer and smoking a cigarette. It is an amazing little bit of nothing, but at the same time is everything.”