Billy Connolly: The day an IRA leader, 18 off-duty cops and armed soldiers were all in same room for the Big Yin

Long lost doc followed the ‘Big Yin’ on 1975 tour as diary recalls dangerous security situation at two gigs

Billy Connolly in Belfast in 1974

Ivan Little

Scores of Billy Connolly fans have attended sell-out screenings in Belfast of a ‘lost’ film of the Scottish comedian’s October 1975 Irish tour as new details emerged about his trip at the height of the Troubles.

For a recently resurfaced diary about the visit has revealed that the Big Yin did impersonations of ‘the Big Man’, the Rev Ian Paisley and that on the eve of his Belfast shows, Connolly had a dream about Abraham Lincoln, the American president who was shot dead in a theatre in 1865.