Backstage at an Oscar party in Los Angeles, 1999, I am trying to squeeze my way through a rambunctious crowd of contenders, mentally swearing that I will never again wear an evening gown that features a train at the back. Kevin Spacey steps on it, pulling me up short. At least I think it’s Kevin Spacey. I am known for my dreadful errors of recognition, notably mistaking the late Freddie Mercury’s hairdresser for the star himself after a Queen concert in the eighties.
I am again jerked to a halt when Geena Davis (surely it is she) sticks her heel right through the middle of my train. A child actor, whose name I definitely don’t know, extricates steel from satin. Thanking him and glaring at her, I continue on my obstacle course, searching for my husband. I spot him by the bar, engrossed in conversation with Bill Maher, the quick-witted comedian who hosts the TV show Politically Incorrect. Billy is one of his favourite guests on the show, always offering an original and outrageous topical comment.
‘Pamela, this is Bill Maher.’ Billy no longer takes any chances with me.
‘Hi, Bill. Um. Billy, Ben’s here.’
‘Ben who?’
‘Kingsley. I’ve been chatting to him in the back room. Go and say hello.’
While Bill and I catch up, Billy takes off in search of the bald thespian, best known for his stunning performance in Gandhi.
‘You fucking idiot!’ He’s back already. ‘That’s Patrick Stewart.’
As Billy’s fame escalated, he began to meet many of his heroes. He was particularly fascinated with rock stars, especially the wild ones like Mick Jagger and Keith Moon. Billy opened for Elton John in the American College in London and came across his old pal Davey Johnstone who had joined Elton’s band. Davey is a sweet man and a talented guitarist who had been playing the banjo in the Scottish folk scene since he was sixteen. Billy called him ‘The Child Protestant from Edinburgh’.
In July and August of 1976, Billy opened for Elton during his USA tour. Billy learned the hard way that it is not easy to play someone else’s audience. ‘Hearing them announce my name is like someone saying “Ready, Aim. FIRE!”’ moaned Billy at the time.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’ the announcer would boom.
‘Whaaaa!’ went the crowd.
‘Elton John…’
‘WHAAAAA!’ The crowd’s crescendo lifted towards a peak until he finished his sentence: ‘would like you to welcome his friend… BILLY CONNOLLY!’
‘Ooooohhhh … Boooo!’ they would go.
It is unlikely that every stadium on Elton’s tour was filled with four thousand stoned Puerto Rican people, ‘all holding hands trying to get in touch with the living’, but that’s what it felt like to Billy. Some nights he won, some nights he lost. None of them really wanted to sit through the antics of a Scottish idiot wearing tights and banana boots.
Billy was assuaging his hangover with a cup of tea one morning when he came across an article about one of his heroes, Tom Waits, in Rolling Stone magazine. Waits informed the world that he died on stage every night while opening for another rock band. Tom described it as ‘a nightly exercise in terror’. ‘Oh thank God, I’m not alone,’ sighed Billy.
Despite the difficulty of supporting another act, Billy was learning valuable stage survival techniques and was subsequently sought after to open for other bands. After touring the east coast of the United States with Elton, he opened for Elvis Costello, played a week at the Bottom Line in New York with the Irish band Horslips and supported the jazz guitarist, Larry Coryell.
Billy managed to hold his own with the audiences of all those artists, although sometimes it was pretty alarming. During his tour of Kansas City, Chicago and Boston with Manhattan Transfer, the band got stuck in a blizzard and he had to do an entire show himself. With Dr Hook and the Medicine Show, Billy visited Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Washington, Atlantic City and Georgetown, and he was relieved to find that at least Dr Hook’s audience appreciated him. Billy now bestrode the world like a giant velvet-looned colossus, at least until the day his luggage got lost and he had to go on stage in corduroys with borrowed equipment.
Whenever Billy was in Los Angeles he stayed at the Hyatt Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, known as ‘the Riot House’, where every rocker in the world had checked in or partied at one time or another. One or two had never checked out. Numerous true tales and apocryphal fables have emanated from the Hyatt. One night, when Billy returned there from his concert he ran into Tony Palmer who had directed the Welly Boot Show. Tony was sitting at the bar with a fat, short-haired guy wearing a sports jacket with a Hereford cow badge on his lapel. He looked like a dentist but he was talking about ‘gigs’ and people hiding under tables in Greece.
‘Are you in a band?’ asked Billy.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m a drummer.’
It was John Bonham, from Led Zeppelin, better known as ‘Bonzo’.
‘Wanna go to a party tomorrow night in my room?’
He was on the same hotel floor as Billy.
‘Is that your bodyguard at the end of the hall?’ inquired Billy.
It was. The next evening there was a long line of bizarre people along the corridor outside Bonzo’s door. Periodically, a man came wandering along and sectioned off part of the queue, saying, ‘All right, everyone up to here, in you go.’ They were changing the guests every fifteen minutes. A man sat at the door with vials of amyl nitrate that he smashed and held up to each guest’s nose as he entered the party room.
‘We’ve got a gig tomorrow night,’ said Bonzo. ‘Do you want to come?’ Absolutely Billy wanted to go. He couldn’t believe it. Elvis Presley had lent Bonzo his gold Lincoln Continental to travel as far as the private Star Jet. That luxurious aircraft whisked them to San Diego where a motorcycle escort met them and escorted them to the gig. On the way, Bonzo was roaring at Billy’s story about an English saxophone player called Jimmy Jewell who had gone on the road with Gary Glitter’s Rock ‘n Roll Circus. The show was dying everywhere and Jimmy hadn’t been paid for weeks, so he got up in the middle of the night and raided the petty cash box. He skipped off, leaving a note inside saying: ‘Goodbye, cruel circus, I’m off to join the world.’
Best of all, Billy met Jimmy Page, the most mysterious man alive in rock ‘n’ roll. Jimmy, who was an Aleister Crowley fanatic, wore velvet pants with weird signs and stars on them, which everyone assumed had deep and portentous meanings. Legend had it the pants were transported by vestal virgins who’d been flayed on the way to the gig. When Billy met Jimmy, however, he had the sacred pants in a plastic Safeway’s bag.
On the way back, Bonzo told Billy about the time he fell asleep during a performance of their most famous song, ‘Stairway to Heaven’. The drums didn’t come in until three minutes into the song, so Bonzo nodded off. It was pure luck that he woke just in time. Billy is the only person in the world who ever interviewed Bonzo. He agreed to talk to Billy for a show on Tyne-Tees Television called All Right Now, but just before the interview he became really nervous and shovelled down a two-course meal of cocaine and brandy.
‘OK,’ Billy improvised, ‘we’ll do a non-interview. I’ll ask long, rambling questions and you nod, shrug and look bored. Then we’ll go and have a proper dinner.’
Billy seemed to gravitate towards convivial fellow performers who were also party-minded. One such person was Brian Connolly, singer with the Sweet, who had long blond hair and the shakes, while another was Les Gray, from the band Mud, who was afflicted by psoriasis and wore gloves over his flaking skin in case he snowed on people. Mai Kingsnorth, Billy’s sound engineer, referred to them as ‘Shake ‘n’ Vac’.
Billy had developed a piece of comedy about the children’s television puppet characters Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men, smoking marijuana. It always went down well with his British audiences, but any drug reference was a sure hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, the mid-seventies rock ‘n’ roll scene was very much a drug culture and the audience wasn’t the only group enjoying an alternative reality. As Billy says now, ‘It snowed in ‘seventy-six.’
One of Elton’s roadies introduced Billy to cocaine during their tour. It’s not surprising that Billy became very drawn to that particular drug, for it has a very interesting effect on people like him who have difficulty concentrating. Instead of amping them up in the usual way, such stimulants can have a paradoxical effect and actually help them to concentrate. Unfortunately, his cocaine abuse escalated along with his alcohol abuse, and didn’t stop until after he met me. His ambition was always to use it and have some left in the morning, but that never happened.
After the tour with Elton, Billy made a unique album, produced by Phil Coulter, called Atlantic Bridge. Half of it was recorded at Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline where Andrew Carnegie came from and the other half at Carnegie Hall in New York. The Python star Eric Idle came to see Billy in New York and brought Paul Simon and Mick Jagger. The next day Eric phoned. ‘Why don’t you come round?’ he suggested. ‘I’m talking to Mr Jagger.’
It was the beginning of a great friendship with the Python star. Eric had been to see him before, usually in London with Peter Cook in tow, but Billy had always been very wary of them. ‘I’d always been scared of people with tertiary education and high intellects in case they found me wanting,’ he explains. ‘I thought they viewed me as just a welder who knew a few jokes.’
‘He was pure joy,’ says Eric. ‘Breathtakingly honest. We went backstage and there he was in his banana boots. The next day he came round to my hotel room and entertained us for three hours telling us stories of Scottish bank robberies. We all howled the entire afternoon … he was extraordinary.’
Back in London, Elton phoned Billy while he was in the process of having a sepia photo-portrait taken by the photographer Terry O’Neill. ‘Maureen?’ That’s what Elton calls Billy. ‘Want to come and hear my new album?’ Billy went out to the Mill Studios, already bomb-happy on wine and cocaine, then continued to party when he got there. Elton played him one of his latest tracks then left the sound suite briefly to confer with a studio technician. When he returned, he found that Billy had collapsed onto the floor. ‘Jesus! Somebody wake him up! Get help!’ People frantically tried to revive him, imagining he had passed away. When Billy came round he was embarrassed about all the fuss.
‘I’m perfectly fine,’ he informed them. ‘It’s happened before…’
‘But you can’t accept that sort of thing happening … you just died!’
‘Fuck,’ Billy shrugged his shoulders, ‘that’s what life’s like.’
‘Dad, did you ever meet Jimi Hendrix?’
Our teenager Amy is playing an air guitar, wearing headphones and sliding around adopting seventies rocker poses.
‘Yep.’
‘You’re kidding.’ The action stops. ‘What was he like?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘What d’you mean, you don’t know …?’
‘Well, now, this is why you must never take drugs. After he died, I met Jimi’s roadie in LA. I said, “I wish I’d met Jimi. I thought he was brilliant,” and he said, “You did. He was very fond of you.” Apparently we had a great night together in the Speakeasy in London …’
‘Oh. Dad … what are you like!’ Amy is rolling her eyes.
‘Which proves my point …’ insists her father ‘… if you remember the seventies, you weren’t there.’
Billy is one of the lucky ones, for some did not survive the effects of the seventies. The night before Billy left for one of his tours of the Australian continent, he was out on the razzle in London with Keith Moon. Keith seemed surprisingly abstinent. ‘I’m only doing brandy suppositories these days, dear boy,’ he said.
‘I’m going to Australia tomorrow,’ Billy informed him in the course of the evening.
‘Then tell them from me to fuck off,’ replied Keith. He’d had a run-in there with the press. When Billy arrived in Australia the headlines seemed to scream a warning to him. Keith had died that night.
‘Fuck,’ thought Billy, ‘maybe I’d better take it easy.’
Billy toured Australia for the first time towards the end of 1976. He was glad to find that continent to be a lot more fun than Nevil Shute had described it. In the main, his concerts there were extremely successful, but Billy tells a dramatic story about getting beaten up on stage during a show in Brisbane. In the story Billy has told thousands of people, the audience didn’t just boo him off, they actually booed him on. ‘Oh, come on.’ protested Billy, dodging well-aimed missiles, ‘at least give me a chance to bore you first…’
Then an irate man ran towards the stage shouting, ‘We didn’t come here to listen to this filth!’
‘So … where do you normally go?’ inquired Billy.
He took a swing at Billy but failed to realize that Billy’s chin does not reach the end of his beard and completely missed.
‘Is that your best shot, pal?’ taunted Billy.
‘No!’ said the man, and nutted him.
Billy fabricated this story, partly because he thought if he told the truth it might cause trouble and partly because it made people roar: ‘It was living proof that Brisbane people interfere with kangaroos,’ he jibed afterwards, obfuscating what had really happened. Billy had in fact become the target for religious persecution by a pocket of Scottish religious bigots in the audience, who shouted anti-Catholic curses and Rangers FC war cries. The whole thing got completely out of control, and Billy had to come off stage. ‘Fuck!’ He was distraught. ‘Is the whole Australian tour going to be like this? I can’t leave … I haven’t even earned my fare back.’
Fortunately his show in Canberra the following night was a very different experience. He has always teased Canberra folk for the clichéd notions, probably envy-based, that are held in other states about the lack of soul in their capital, but he was relieved at his warm reception there. It was followed by equal success in Sydney and Melbourne, and subsequent visits to all Australian cities, including Brisbane, have been just dandy.
On one occasion in Sydney, just before Billy was due to play the Opera House, he recorded a marvellous television interview with Michael Parkinson. ‘Eh Parkie,’ said Billy on their way back to the Sebel Town House, which at the time was the Australian equivalent of the Riot House in LA, ‘I think we’ll have a wee dram.’
The pair had become great mates. Billy has always highly valued his friendship with Michael. ‘Just think of all the great people he’s met,’ Billy always wonders, ‘yet he chose me as his friend.’ ‘He is everything in a man that I like,’ says Michael. ‘He’s incredibly masculine, funny and liked a drink’.
Their love affair came close to being consummated that evening in Sydney. The Sebel Town House bar was closed so they drove to a ‘dive’ in King’s Cross where they found the entire Queensland rugby team had also gathered, for a post-game beer. The shortest team player was a steak-fed mountain and each one sported a badly shaved head and an attitude to match. Michael felt a shadow looming over his face as one of these monsters squeezed himself threateningly between him and Billy, facing him square-on.
‘Hey, Parko …’ That was what they called him in Australia.
‘Yes,’ replied Michael nervously.
Before the rugby player could continue, Billy’s voice rang out insolently from behind him.
‘See you!’ He was actually addressing the hulk. ‘Why don’t you fuck off!’
It’s a miracle they got out of there in one piece. They were both truly pissed and heading back to the Sebel Town House when the driver suddenly alerted Michael.
‘He’s gone.’
‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’
‘He’s got out of the car!’
The vehicle had stopped for traffic in the middle of King’s Cross, a five-way thoroughfare as busy and dangerous as the Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Michael was horrified to see Billy standing smack in the middle of the Cross, doing an arm-flailing, Fred Astaire-inspired dance.
‘Puttin’ on my top hat…’ sang Billy, ‘I’ve pudding on my top hat…’
‘Billy, Billy, Billy …’ Michael had braved the side-swiping vehicles to try to coax him out of harm’s way.
‘I’ve seen him,’ announced Billy, mysteriously. His eyes were gone.
‘Billy.’ Michael pleaded, ‘come on back to the car.’
‘Eh Parkie,’ he proposed, ‘can you dance?’
‘Yes … on occasion … but…’
‘Can you take the woman’s part?’
He whirled Michael around in a bizarrely rhythmic fashion until a couple of approaching policemen sent them scurrying for safety.
The following night Michael had grave concerns about Billy’s ability to give of his best, but despite the odds he gave the best performance Michael had ever seen … or at least that’s what it seemed like through the filter of Michael’s own sore head. ‘You bastard,’ said Michael.
The idea of doing the unexpected always had great appeal for Billy. ‘I know. Let’s tour the seaside in winter!’ he said to Frank one day when he was back in Britain. Frank was very dubious. Summer was traditionally the time to attract audiences to those seaside towns. To everyone’s surprise, the off-season ‘Seaside Extravaganza Tour’ worked extremely well and established a precedent so that others soon followed suit. The seaside audiences loved Billy’s new rendition of ‘Half-Stoned Cowboy’, written by Seamus Healy, that parodied Glen Campbell’s hit ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. It was Billy’s latest spoof of the American country music he loved. Such pieces gave him a chance to play great music and be funny at the same time.
It was during the tour that Frank Lynch mentioned. ‘Hey, a guy wants you to do a movie with Richard Burton.’ Billy had never been in a movie before, yet his first scene in Absolution was with this celebrated actor. ‘Hi Fiddle Dee Dee.’ thought Billy, ‘an actor’s life for me!’ Billy thought Richard was magnificent and they quickly became friends.
‘Do you know Ronnie Fraser?’ asked Richard. Billy liked Ronnie. He was a piss-artist with a face like a dartboard. The two actors had been drinking buddies before Richard went on the wagon.
‘How is Ronnie these days?’ inquired Richard.
‘I believe he’s got cirrhosis of the face,’ replied Billy.
In the movie, Richard Burton played a priest who found Billy’s body in the forest. When they were filming the forest scene. Billy had to lie perfectly still wearing ‘dead’ make-up, half-covered with leaves. Richard approached the body, to play the emotional moments of discovery and a realization that he knew the killer. As the Welshman leant over Billy’s shallow grave, his face betrayed a moving depiction of horror. When the camera closed in on Billy, however, the body had a difficult time keeping still and a huge grin soon spread across its powdery face. Richard Burton had begun to sing at the top of his lungs: ‘I Belong to Glasgow’.
Shortly after Billy’s movie debut, Frank Lynch booked him to play a week at the famous Roxy, a rock ‘n’ roll venue on Sunset Boulevard in LA. Phil Coulter was there on the first night. ‘I saw him die there: it was painful. He came out and sang the Welly Boot song and, at best, they must have tittered. He soldiered on manfully for maybe fifteen minutes. I could see he was giving them his best shots, but he just couldn’t get through to them. He finally picked up his guitar and said, “Fuck this, I’m off.” There was a major row backstage and I thought he was going to throttle Frank. The week was cancelled.’ ‘I went down like a burning Spitfire.’ Billy joked afterwards.
Despite his American disaster, Billy’s popularity in the UK expanded until he was achieving bigger tours than most artists dream of. He was eventually playing eighty-nine nights on a single tour, whereas most rock bands did ten or so. Established comedians only played nightclubs with a few hundred seats and perhaps the London Palladium if they were lucky, but Billy was selling out rock venues. The record for the Apollo in Glasgow had previously been held by Status Quo, who had managed five nights. Billy did twelve.
Billy’s new confidence was apparent from the moment he stepped on stage: ‘Right. So first I’m going to tell you the rules so you know how to behave. There’s a code of behaviour at my show. This is not your folk singer … I’m a showbiz personality … I’ve been on Swap Shop. Anything that moves is mine!’
Anyone who dared come in late was mercilessly harangued by Billy. A man who dared go to the toilet might find on his return that he had been the object of ridicule during his entire absence, with Billy leading the crowd in a verse or two of ‘The Happy Wanderer’ and inventing every possible sound effect from his bathroom experience.
In the process of building his concert audience, Billy had to be away from Iris and the family a great deal. By the end of the seventies, the couple was in serious trouble. Each had a problem with alcohol, although neither could see it: most of the people they mixed with got pissed on a regular basis. Billy’s astounding rise to public attention had been extraordinarily difficult for Iris. When she first knew Billy, he was not long out of his welding boots and now he was one of the most famous names in the country. Iris never liked show business. It is a discomfort shared by the spouses of many famous personalities. As one Hollywood woman who is married to a movie star has observed: ‘Wives are superfluous.’
Iris’s underlying resentment towards Billy came out when she threw him a surprise thirty-fifth birthday party at the Salmon Leap. ‘An extraordinary amount of drink had been consumed,’ reports Ralph McTell. A huge chocolate cake was wheeled out. ‘Billy Connolly …’ announced Iris, imitating Eamon Andrews, ‘this is your … cake!’ She pushed his head into it and Billy retaliated in kind. Soon an unbelievably messy skirmish was underway. There was cake everywhere, on the walls and in the carpet.
‘The Scots seem to have a more aggressive sense of fun,’ observes Ralph. ‘I left my jacket there, all covered in chocolate icing and just scarpered. Truthfully, I was a little worried. Perhaps the skean dhus [Scottish daggers] were coming out next!’
Iris had much to cope with and Billy was hardly ever there. Billy himself thought the two had very little in common once the bells had stopped ringing and they were alone in a room together. In fact, nothing in life seemed permanent to him. It was delightful to have fame, but that, too, seemed temporary. Frank Lynch moved to new pastures in the United States and Harvey Goldsmith took over, with his employee Pete Brown acting as Billy’s day-to-day manager. Pete was a skinny man with a cheeky face who accepted the tiresome role of babysitter to his newest client.
Although Billy had had more than enough proof that he was exceptionally good at what he did, he still felt like a fraud sometimes, a welder who hadn’t yet been found out. He was still convinced that, any minute, somebody was going to tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself, because Monday morning you’ve got your working boots on. You’re a welder again.’ On the other hand, it was wonderful to have such success. It gave the lie to the people who said he was stupid. ‘You can’t be stupid and sustain it,’ thought Billy. ‘You can be stupid and make it, but if it isn’t born of brightness it will dim like a shooting star. Pfffttt!’
Deep down, though, he still had his doubts, and was bitterly disappointed to discover that fame was a hollow victory. He had thought all his worries would go away once he was successful and had some money, but they refused to evaporate. He was particularly worried about money because he was terrified of being famous and broke at the same time. That would be like going to hell. His underlying insecurities disappeared when he was drunk, but came raging back in the morning, so Billy took to asking for the wine list at breakfast. After his show at night, he would go to the nearest bar and ask for a pint of wine. Ten bottles later, he was ready to start a fight. ‘I spent the whole time battering people I liked and singing with my arm round people I loathed,’ he remembers.
One night after 2 a.m., Billy was so pissed he couldn’t find his way out of a London phone box. Luckily, he was able to remember Pete Brown’s number, so he managed to call him for help.
‘It’s not that difficult,’ said his manager, forcing himself awake. ‘There’s only four sides and one’s got the phone on it.’
‘I cannae … find the door …’ repeated Billy, utterly gone.
‘Billy … where are you?’ insisted Pete.
‘I’m eh … I’m … och, somewhere in London,’ he was barely coherent.
‘Read the address on the notice by the phone.’
‘I cannae focus,’ Billy was about to pass out.
Fortunately, our hero is a creature of habit. Pete willed himself into his car and drove around all Billy’s usual haunts. It was miraculous that he actually found him and managed to drag his comatose body out of its red-box prison.
‘I was just enjoying a wee snooze,’ complained Billy.
‘Good news,’ announced John Lloyd, who co-produced the popular new BBC 2 topical comedy show, Not the Nine 0’Clock News, starring Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson. ‘Billy Connolly has agreed to come on next week’s show.’
‘Brilliant!’ enthused the three boys.
‘Who’s Billy Connolly?’ I inquired.
Billy knew who the artist known as ‘Pamela Stephenson’ was. The first time he saw me, in the summer of 1979, I was upside down on a television screen. George McManus showed Billy a video of Not the Nine O’Clock News at Transatlantic Records and he thought it was excellent. In the clip, I portrayed a television newsreader in a sketch about a world gravity shortage. They’d filmed me hanging upside down then shown it the right way up so my hair was standing on end. Billy thought it was the most stunning effect, seeing the drink of water spilling up in the air and the phone receiver flying up off its hook. But when the two show producers, John Lloyd and Sean Hardie, asked him to be a guest on Not the Nine O’clock News, he was ambivalent. ‘It’s the hottest TV comedy show around,’ he conceded to Pete, ‘but maybe I shouldn’t do it. I’m not very good at sketches.’
We didn’t usually have guests on the show. We impersonated pretty well everyone who was famous at the time, so it wasn’t necessary. I had neither seen nor heard of Billy, but was curious to meet the man who was so revered by this bunch of talented, too-cool-for-the-room funsters who poured scorn on most people. In their presence. I was a kind of female Crocodile Dundee character, which embarrassed me. In vain I tried to hide my profound ignorance about British society, politics and the people I impersonated.
We all turned up at Billy’s Three Kings Yard flat in the autumn of 1979. He greeted us at the top of the entrance stairs in Levi’s, a satin tour jacket and cowboy boots. I was speechless with surprise. In my working life I was mainly surrounded by youths, but here was an alpha-man, a crazy, hilarious, sensitive, charismatic savage. I was desperately wishing I had worn something more feminine than my jeans and oversize man’s tweed jacket and tie.
Billy, apparently, had a terrible hangover that morning and found it hard to be a good host. He had some beer in the fridge, but last night’s brandy had left him with an adding-up dysfunction and he couldn’t work out if he had enough for everyone or not, so he offered nothing. ‘Anyone else desperate for food?’ he asked. We all piled into a taxi to go and eat lunch at Geale’s in Notting Hill, where Billy delivered the final coup de grâce by eating his grilled Dover sole with his bare hands. What an animal! I was thrilled.
Billy left convinced he had offended me on two counts. In the first place, he had noticed my eyes popping out of my head when he ate his fish with his hands. His friend China, an engineer on a Clyde paddle steamer called the Waverley had influenced him in that regard. Some years earlier, Billy had filmed Clydoscope on that boat, the last ocean-going paddle steamer left in the whole world. When lunchtime came around, he and the film crew got a measly fish supper. The Glasgow ‘fish supper’ is usually haddock or plaice, fried in batter, with chips – an extremely greasy affair that helps to explain why the city became known as the heart-attack capital of the world.
‘Don’t eat that crap,’ objected China. ‘Come on down with me to the engine room where the boys are.’ So Billy followed him down below, inside the black-and-red painted hull with its decorated wheels, to where the crew congregated in a dark place without portholes. They were given a whole herring each and two giant boiled potatoes, a meal that suited Billy just fine, but he was not given any eating utensils. When he requested knife and fork, the crew burst out laughing and made fun of him in Gaelic before wolfing into the herring and potatoes with their fingers. From that moment on, Billy was inspired to copy them.
His second perceived faux pas in Geale’s was a curious one: ‘I really don’t like the name “Neville”,’ he suddenly announced. ‘It’s a terrible name.’ Billy now thinks his ostensibly casual words were portentous, because in truth he had never thought such a thing in his life. The only Neville he’d even heard of was Nevil Shute, so he has no idea where his remark came from. Apparently. I looked at him as though I’d been shot and said, ‘My father’s name is Neville.’
In the show, Billy played the Ayatollah Khomeini, running in slow motion towards me while I sang a love-song to him dressed as a terrorist. It was a terrific piece of satire, but that week the Iranian Embassy was blown up, so for reasons of taste the show had to be ditched until the following week. Another of our scenes, where I played the media personality Janet Street-Porter, would have been innocuous enough to air. Barely intelligible, in huge, fake teeth and a red wig with giant spectacles, I conducted a mock interview:
‘Tonight I’m talking to Billy Connolly, the well-known Scottish comedian.’
The cut-away shot of Billy shows him trying to control his laughter as my ‘Janet’ teeth began to fall out.
‘So, Billy, do a lot of people have trouble understanding your accent?’
‘Eh? Sorry?’ asked Billy, as if not understanding Janet’s.
After the taping of that show we congregated in the green room for some horrible snacks and a drink. I sensed that Billy had not been too impressed with me. I felt hurt when I noticed him saying goodbye to everyone else and avoiding me. He left with Pete Brown, then a Mick Jagger emulator in a fur coat. Seconds after leaving the room Billy ran back, sucked the beer off his moustache and gave me a little peck on the cheek.
‘Cheerio,’ he said. ‘You’re great. Keep it up.’
Bastard clearly hated me.