Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet – Film Review

Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet (1976)
Director: Murray Grigor
Format: Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) and digitally.
Run time: 77 minutes
RRP: £19.99
Release Date: 20 May 2024

Jamie Havlin finally gets to watch a documentary on Billy Connolly’s 1975 live dates on both sides of the Irish border.

1975 was a crucial year in the career of Billy Connolly. His tour proved tremendously popular and included a staggering thirteen nights at the Glasgow Apollo. Before the year was out, he’d even managed to notch a number one single in the British charts with D.I.V.O.R.C.E and scored a top ten album with Get Right Intae Him (comedy albums being a thing back then). He also landed his first role in a TV drama in Peter McDougall’s award-winning Just Another Saturday.

This level of success had been kickstarted early in the year, when he was booked to make his debut as a guest on Parkinson.

The story goes that in a taxi on the way to the studio, Billy’s manager Frank Lynch pleaded with him not to tell a joke about a man murdering his wife and then burying her with her bum sticking up out a mound of earth, fearing it was unsuitable for a Saturday night prime-time audience and that telling it might backfire badly on the Big Yin.

Billy wasn’t one to take advice. This joke, in particular, catapulted him into the limelight. He also ignored advice on playing Belfast at a time when Northern Ireland was in turmoil and entertainers routinely body-swerved the Six Counties as part of their tour schedules.

Atrocities were being regularly perpetrated by both sides of the divide, one high-profile recent example being what was dubbed ‘the Miami Showband Massacre’. This saw three musicians from a popular touring pop band and two others killed in County Down by loyalist paramilitary organisation the Ulster Volunteer Force.

A number of those close to Connolly, including his wife, urged him not to perform in Belfast, but undeterred, he signed on the dotted line to appear.

‘I don’t feel like a crusader or anything,’ he explains to a journalist in Dublin. ‘But I think I’ve got a kinda duty to go. I sell records up there.’

In an interview that is included as an extra on this release, director Murray Grigor and Billy Johnson, the road manager on the tour, both chillingly recall guns being confiscated from audience members as they attempted to enter the venue. Billy had thought of including some material on the subject of the Troubles, but as he explains: ‘Well, if I lived in Belfast, and I was surrounded by soldiers and the occasional bomb, the occasional killing, when I went for a night out to see a comedian, the last thing I would want to be reminded of was the depressing side of things.’ He does, though, ad-lib a high-risk joke when presented with a gift from an audience member.

This is not a stand-up comedy show, instead it’s a documentary shot over a couple of days as Billy plays dates late in 1975. The films cuts between concert footage and Billy offstage. We see his drunk man in George Square unable to walk and his wee boy needing a pee in the classroom routines. We also get glimpses into the touring comedian’s life: Billy bantering away with two tea ladies and, with some help from Billy Johnson, sliding into those big banana boots of his backstage.

These boots, designed by John Byrne and made by Glaswegian pop artist Edmund Smith, became a Connolly trademark around this time, the inspiration coming via a children’s rhyme once popular in Scotland:

Skinny-malinky long-legs, big banana feet,
Went tae the pictures and couldnae find a seat.
When the film got started, Skinny-malinky farted,
Skinny-malinky long-legs, big banana feet.

Billy specialises in observational humour although he sometimes veers towards the surreal, such as his sequence about how much better life would be if you could fart through your fingers. Billy has a fixation with farts. And jobbies and snotters and willies.

Almost fifty years on, it’s odd to think of so many people finding jokes about bodily functions offensive but more controversial still was his Crucifixion sketch set in Glasgow’s Gallowgate. This sent many religious types into an apoplectic rage. Sadly, it isn’t included here, likely due to its length. At a meet-and-greet with the Irish press, he alludes to Pastor Jack Glass, a fire and brimstone Protestant preacher who habitually led protests outside his Scottish shows, branding Connolly a blasphemer – which the comedian found equally baffling and amusing.

Of the reactionary campaigner Mary Whitehouse, he quips: ‘I wouldnae be too cheery if my name rhymed with toilet,’ but he praises Kenneth Tynan for being the first person on British television to say fuck, singing early favourite A Four Letter Word in his honour.

Songs play a surprisingly large part of his performance, with even a bluegrass instrumental picked out on his banjo included in his set. Billy actually describes himself as ‘a comic singer, a banjo player,’ to one interviewer. To digress slightly, I only discovered days ago that his old folk-rock band The Humblebums once shared a string of dates on tour with Sandy Denny’s band Fotheringay and Nick Drake.

In Big Banana Feet, Billy is young, hairy, loud, gallus and very funny too. His fans are in for a real treat.

I’ve been hoping to see Big Banana Feet for a long time, but had almost given up any hope of ever doing so. The BFI deserve a lot of praise, particularly Douglas Weir, for their efforts in locating the only two known existing prints (with two slightly different edits, Weir snapping up one of them up on eBay). These were then scanned, remastered and pieced them together to make a definitive version with this 2K restoration.

Special features include Murray Grigor and Billy Johnson in Conversation (2024, 18 mins); Clydescope (1974, 31 mins): a panorama of the Clyde, from Biggar to Brodick, with Billy Connolly as your guide; BLAST (1975, 24 mins): Grigor’s take on Vorticism, Britain’s first avant-garde artistic movement and – with the first pressing only – an illustrated booklet.

For more on the release click here.

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All words by Jamie Havlin. Jamie has written a couple of short films screened on British TV and at international festivals and he regularly contributes to the glam rock fanzine Wired Up! More writing by Jamie can be found at his Louder Than War author’s archive.