Hunched low and lonely on Stockwell Street, a single tooth amid the clanking bridgework of urban renewal, the Scotia bar in the centre of Glasgow is a remnant of a bygone age. It is a lingering reminder of the city’s spit-and-sawdust days, when glamour was possessing a full complement of fingers and William James Connolly was a long-haired welder tuning his banjo by the fruit machine.

Long considered the crucible of Connolly’s career, the place where he learnt to transmute the vicious banter of the shipyards into a style that would conquer the comedy world, the Scotia displays few traces of its illustrious former performer.

A curling snap of Connolly above the till is the only proof of a connection. That and the Scotia’s frequent appearances in Connolly’s routines, three decades after he drank there.

“See, if this was a pub in Dublin,” says Peter McDougall, Connolly’s long-time friend and the writer of three television dramas in which the comic appeared, “there’d be paintings and posters of the guy everywhere. There’d be tea towels with his face on them.

“They have a deep reverence for talent over there. They honour the people they love. Here, they don’t. There’s an unconscious hostility towards anyone who gets away. Billy’s suffered that from day one.”

The relationship between Connolly and his home city has often been a fractious one. It dates back to the days when folk wisdom had it that he merely polished up what he’d heard on street corners, depicting his own folk as scowling, unlettered drunks, through to the present day when half of John Byrne’s portrait of Connolly in 1974 (the more famous part of the image still hangs in the People’s Palace) has apparently been mislaid.

In several biographies, meanwhile, it has been advanced that Connolly never quite forgave the city for the lukewarm reception it gave his play An Me Wi’ Ma Bad Leg Tae in the late 1970s.

Today the city has statues to John Greig, former captain of Rangers, Donald Dewar, the former first minister, and Lobey Dosser, the equine hero of a 1950s cartoon strip. But it has never recognised the man whom another friend, Jimmy Reid, the former union leader at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, calls “the most famous Glaswegian in history”. His only mark in his native Partick is a bakery that advertises Connolly’s fondness for its meat pies, despite his strict vegetarianism. The advertisement also misspells his name.

To my mind the city seems to feel it lost Connolly twice. First when he moved to London in 1979, when the rough blasphemer performed work such as the infamous crucifixion sketch (“People to this day think the Last Supper was in Galilee. When, in actual fact, it was in Gallowgate, in Glasgow. Near the Cross”). He then underwent a personality boilwash in the mid-1980s to emerge as a vegetarian teetotaller in a linen suit, talking about reiki healing and baby alarms.

As further evidence, the upcoming Glasgow International comedy festival features a show entitled The Big Yin Revisited. Its concept requires some thinking about.

Gary Moir, the stand-up comic and, like Connolly, a former welder in the Glasgow shipyards, performs his own material. Vocally, though, it is in the style of Connolly during his mid-1970s heyday, replete with leotard, banjo and hair like an exploded sofa.

It all sounds a bizarre hybrid of Stars In Their Eyes and proxy stalking but, more centrally, it seems to address the idea that one version of Connolly is to all intents and purposes dead. Particularly when Moir says he covers subjects — the internet, why the c-word is the new f-word — that Connolly would “if he was still around”.

Yet clearly he is. Connolly’s three nights at the Glasgow Armadillo in April sold out in 24 hours, as three additional nights did in half that time. The feat was repeated with his nine other dates around Scotland. And that when the modern Connolly show is a curious thing, so different from its classic 1970s model that the two entities are almost entirely distinct. What carries Connolly now is not his nailing of hitherto unidentified types or quirks of speech and behaviour, but the enormous tolerance of his audience.

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