I once interviewed Billy Connolly in his management office in Fulham, bedecked with wind chimes and Balinese bric-a-brac (the office, that is, rather than either of us). He was very accommodating and pleasant; up until the moment talk turned to the British press.
Then a crack of thunder could be heard in the distance. The entire institution, Connolly frothed, would soon feel the “black sperm of (his) vengeance”. He didn’t elaborate on the genito-urinary particulars of this pledge. It was enough, it seemed, to assert that (a) revenge would soon be his and (b) that it would assume a singularly unpleasant form.
Seven years later, we are still waiting for the consummation of this technically challenging threat and the British press continue doing whatever it is that riles him so much, usually at airports. Their encounters now have all the dull inevitability of the clocks going forward. The whole topic is a sore which has been festering for so long that nobody can recall what caused the wound in the first place.
If nothing else, then, the Ken Bigley affair has served to remind at least one of the factions. It rolled all of Connolly’s previous PR solecisms — moving to America, turning Buddhist/vegetarian, toadying to the royal family, playing the laird at his Aberdeenshire estate — into a ball and multiplied them by five.
Connolly’s claim, made on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo in London two weeks ago, that the Muslim fanatics who had held Bigley captive for 42 days should “just get on with it” and behead him, as they had with two of Bigley’s colleagues, caused a dropping of jaws around the world.
It wasn’t the type of joke which prompted debate about the boundaries of comedy or taste; it was the type which prompted debate on the parameters of Connolly’s mental health. It was a gag which balanced the laughter of 2,000 people against the prayers of countless others. It was this equation from which Connolly was prepared to profit.
Most crucially, though, it was the remark of a man who knows he cannot be held to account for anything he says, no matter how invidious. Famously, Connolly is protected by one of the most disobliging management teams in show business, Tickety-boo, a company with an answerphone message that might as well be the single word “No”. On the rare occasions when he submits to personal interrogation it is invariably to Michael Parkinson, an old friend and toothless acolyte. His authorised biographies are written by his wife, Pamela Stephenson. For all his ubiquity and rootsy plain speaking, Connolly is indulged and unapproachable to an extent which would embarrass a Hollywood potentate.
As with so many Hollywood celebrities, the airport is the sole chink in the armour. It was at Heathrow that Connolly was finally collared for his crimes against tact. Asked why he had made the remark, Connolly answered: “I’ve got nothing to say. Why the f*** would I want to talk to you? I don’t give a f*** if you are asking me a question. I don’t know who you are. You’re the enemy.”
Quizzed on whether he was sorry for the joke, he said: “Never mind. I don’t want to talk to you. You’re a prick. Go and hassle Elton.” Connolly refused to apologise for the comment, merely issuing a statement through his management on Bigley’s eventual murder noting that he was “deeply saddened”.
A fortnight later Connolly is back on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo, his first gig since the controversy, and part of a three-month, 17-show run. Every show sold out as soon as it was announced. The man in the seat behind me paid £250, he says, for a pair of tickets bought through Ebay, even though the face price was £27 each. Outside, the touts are charging £90 for a seat in the stalls, with no shortage of takers.
One explanation for this level of popularity is that Connolly’s audience is getting younger. The bulk of the crowd tonight is in its early thirties and few of them, judging by their appearance, are strangers to happy hours in shopping-mall pubs. It is further evidence of Connolly’s (or his management’s) foresight in targeting the video market, yet it is also the measure of Connolly’s decline as a performer.
When he operated as a conventional comedian, touring theatres around the country, Connolly was obliged to have an act of sorts, a set of loosely assembled but honed routines. Nowadays, Connolly can be a lightning rod for whatever random notions strike him, the verbal diarist of a life whose content is determined by its own celebrity.
Tonight, he retells a number of stories that have appeared almost identically in previous shows, including one about how feminism regrettably allowed women to develop opinions about sex. In almost three hours, I laughed only once, at Connolly’s account of how autograph hunters annoyingly insist on the proper spelling of Alasdair (“I thought it was my f****** name you wanted,” he tells them). The audience’s youth and Connolly’s juvenility create a context where scatology and abuse do the work that wit once did, leaving Connolly little more than an upmarket version of Roy Chubby Brown.
He deals with the Bigley issue as soon as he hits the stage, pacing around with rapid agitation. “You’re looking at a man who got a whole Richard and Judy programme about him,” he says, gleefully, referring to an edition of the tea-time chat show in which a telephone poll inquired whether Connolly could ever be forgiven for his comments on Bigley (77% of callers said no).
“I wasn’t there and they were talking about me! Saying nasty things. That pair of talentless bastards. What are they like? And then the newspapers were having a wee go. They care so much . . . one of the papers had a huge page inside saying what a bastard I was, how low my morality had sunk.
“But the story on the front page was about a woman w****** a pig. These are your moral guardians, ladies and gentlemen. Isn’t it fun! Richard and Judy . . . they should just stay quiet, then nobody’ll find out how rotten they are.”
The matter was rested for the remainder of the show, barring several interspersed comments on Richard Madeley and the alleged dubiety of his parentage. It was a classic Connolly strategy: reframing a problem in terms of its reporting then using the reporting as a surrogate for the subject itself. In such a way it appears that Connolly is addressing a subject and facing up to it, when in fact he says nothing about it.
But, then, he doesn’t have to. Connolly’s invulnerable demographic and his lofty detachment are such that he could make any number of further appalling comments and barely feel the mud splatter his hem.
He has become a frightful bully, willing to address only the converted and noticeably absent when it’s his turn to be on the receiving end. Connolly has become the patron saint of the truly humourless, one who is little more than three years shy of retirement age. Don't you wish that, like the fanatics of Baghdad, he’d just hurry up and get on with it?
