This Is Your Life: Billy Connolly

Billy CONNOLLY (1942-)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Billy Connolly, comedian and musician, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at Thames Television's Teddington Studios while preparing for his appearance on the Big Hogmanay Show.

Billy, who was born in Glasgow, began his performing career playing the banjo in local folk clubs while working as a welder in the shipyards on the Clyde in the early 1960s. He left his job to pursue a career as a folk singer, initially in the band The Humblebums before going solo.

He made the transition from folk singer to comedian with his first album, Billy Connolly Live! released in 1972. Nicknamed The Big Yin, his appearance as a guest on Michael Parkinson's BBC television chat show in 1975 led to wider recognition and international stardom.

"Crackerjack! Oh no!"

programme details...

Edition No: 559
Subject No: 555
Broadcast date: Wed 31 Dec 1980
Broadcast time: 7.00-7.30pm
Recorded: Sun 7 Dec 1980
Venue: Teddington Studios
Series: 21
Edition: 12
Code name: Rig

on the guest list...

Kenny Everett
Elton John - live link
Michael Parkinson
Andrew Parkinson
Iris - wife
Jamie - son
Cara - daughter
William - father
Florence - sister
Ian - brother-in-law
Michael - brother
Helen - sister-in-law
John Dalgleish
Ron Duff
Eileen Duff
William Hillhouse
Eddie McCandless
Tam Harvey
Jimmy Reid
Kenny Dalglish
Rowan Atkinson
Griff Rhys Jones
Mel Smith
Pamela Stephenson

production team...

Researcher: John Graham
Writers: Tom Brennand, Roy Bottomley
Directors: Stuart Hall, Terry Yarwood
Producer: Jack Crawshaw

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

It's a Funny Old Life

it's all about the comedy

This is the secret life

Jack Crawshaw reviews his time on This Is Your Life

Michael Parkinson

Screenshots of Billy Connolly This Is Your Life

Jonathan Margolis recalls this edition of This Is Your Life in his book, The Big Yin: The Life and Times of Billy Connolly...

Connolly's acknowledged debt to Lucas and Dalgleish – along with his understandable oversight in failing to keep in touch with them – led to a sublime moment (at least for Billy) during a 1979 This Is Your Life show. The Thames TV researchers sent to Glasgow to find Lucas and Dalgleish succeeded insofar as they came back with an elderly ex-employee of Stephen's shipyard named Dalgleish. Sadly, the old boy wheeled on to the show by Eamonn Andrews as 'one half of the comical duo who were your inspiration back in those days' was entirely the wrong Dalgleish. Before he was introduced in the studio in London, we saw this surprisingly dour elderly funster filmed on the derelict Stephen's site, describing his long-standing relationship with his old mate Billy. Connolly, to his great credit, gave away nothing other than a brief double take when this Dalgleish came from backstage, and gamely hugged him as if he had been the one man on the show with whom he truly wanted to be reunited.

As crucial as 1974 had been to his career in Scotland, 1975 was the year the rest of the kingdom discovered Billy Connolly - with a vengeance. Michael Parkinson, then the foremost TV chat show host, was instrumental in Connolly's conquering of the English. Eamonn Andrews, presenting Connolly on This Is Your Life in 1980, described what happened: 'In 1975 in Glasgow a taxi driver pulls up outside a record shop and insists his famous passenger buys your LP.' Parkinson then took over the story: 'I thought, well, I'll do it - anything to get to the airport and back home. He gave me a very, very heavy sell. He said, "You must have this man on the show. He's the funniest man I've ever heard." And I actually got the record just to get to the airport. But the nice thing was that not only eventually did I get Billy on the show, I met a mate as well.' It was Parky's son Andrew, Parkinson explained, who told his dad to listen to the record a fortnight later. Andrew was on hand in the This Is Your Life studio to claim that his father had said: 'I'm not listening to any long-haired hippy layabout.'

The first laugh Connolly raised on British TV was on the resulting Parkinson appearance. Looking markedly nervous in a quite revolting tan leather jacket, Billy told the following joke: "This guy was going out to meet his friend in the pub, and he went down, he said: "Oh, hallo, how's it going?" He said, "Fine, fine." "How's the wife?" He said, "Oh, she's dead. I murdered her this morning. Dead." He said, "You're kidding me." He said, "No, I'm not." He said, "I'm not talking to you if you keep talking like that." He said, "Please yourself. I'll show you if you like." He said, "Show me." So they went up to his tenement building through the close (that's the entrance to the tenement) into the back green into the wash house, and sure enough there's a big mound of earth. There was a bum sticking out. He says: "Is that her?" He said, "Aye." He says, "What did you leave her bum sticking out for?" He says, "I need somewhere to park my bike.""

'I think of all the people we've had on the show,' Parkinson told the This Is Your Life audience, 'and there have been four or five hundred - we never had a bigger single reaction than we had to Billy the first time round. It is quite obvious that he's a huge star.' Connolly unequivocally acknowledges that the Parkinson appearance, and especially that joke - unusual, because he did not normally tell jokes in the traditional form - made him truly famous. It was not until 1994, however, that he admitted (in his TV interview with Jeremy Isaacs) that he was given the joke by an unnamed Scottish football fan before a match in Spain.

Not performing in Scotland kept Billy away in England and abroad for increasingly long periods. On This Is Your Life in December 1980, Iris and the children were first shown on tape in Drymen, she highly embarrassed, the children sitting in front of the fire with three labradors. Jamie said, 'We miss you when you're on tour and we know you miss us.' Cara added a hallo from all the animals, and a puppy was seen eating out of Billy's banana boots. 'You're very much a family man,' said Eamonn Andrews. Then Connolly's father, sister Florence and husband Ian, brother Michael (a Woody Allen lookalike) with wife Helen trailed on. (Connolly was said to have gone to work at 'John Brown's Shipyard', rather than Stephen's, the yard he actually worked at. He was then reunited with a man he did not know; Tam Harvey appeared on the programme, and he and Billy played 'Dixie Darling' together; no mention was made of Gerry Rafferty, only that Harvey and Connolly had been together in the Humblebums for three years.)

Nigel Huddleston recalls this edition of This Is Your Life in his book, The Unofficial and Unauthorised Biography of Billy Connolly...

Up seemed to be the only way, and in 1979, Billy was pencilled in to appear on This Is Your Life.

Like Parkinson, This Is Your Life was a TV institution in the Seventies. Unlike today, there was a tendency to keep the subject's identity a secret until the day of screening, which gave the show an extra frisson that's arguably missing today.

And an appearance really seemed to say that you'd made it, even if the detail of the programme making didn't always live up to the billing. Billy was famously presented with an encounter with an old shipyard colleague, who sure enough had the right surname but who Billy had never set eyes on before. Elton John was among the more familiar faces there to sing Billy's praises.

Scriptwriter Roy Bottomley recalls this edition of This Is Your Life in his book, This Is Your Life: The Story of Television's Famous Big Red Book...

Michael Parkinson featured strongly in the Life we did on Billy Connolly. At the height of his chat-show fame, Parky had been visiting Scotland and someone had handed to him a recording made by a local Glasgow comedy hopeful.

By the time he got back to London, a non-stop busy Parkinson forgot all about the record. His son Andrew picked it up and listened to it. He told his father this was exactly the kind of 'unknown' guest he should book for his show. Michael listened to the record, laughed a lot and booked 'The Big Yin'. Who never looked back.

The Herald Scotland 7 September 2024

TV REVIEW

Funny thing happened to Billy Connolly on This is Your Life

By Alison Rowat

In My Own Words: Billy Connolly.

There have been so many retrospectives with Billy Connolly, most using the same old clips. So kudos to the team behind In My Own Words: Billy Connolly (BBC1, Monday) for venturing further than *that* joke on Parkinson and "An Audience With". The effort paid off in Connolly's responses and generated a few revelations besides.

When he was the subject of This Is Your Life, for example, one of those paying tribute was introduced as a fellow worker alongside Connolly in the shipyards, the one who gave him the nickname "the Big Yin" no less.

As the clip played of the chap coming through the This Is Your Life doors, the Connolly of today shot forward in his seat. "That guy was a total fraud!" he shouted. "I didn't know him, he came on and bluffed it." Connolly decided to play along and not to "blow it" for the man, but he found it creepy.

He was fiercely critical of some early performances, including one from 1973 of a "Song for Glasgow" competition, but then he liked a few lines and warmed to the moment after all.

Filmed at home in Florida, Connolly was rocking the full Old Testament, Moses from Govan look. More than a decade on from his diagnosis with Parkinson's, the physical decline is marked. Yet mentally he seems sharper, more reflective. Generous too in his praise of others: Peter Kay was a "genius", the late Robin Williams "the best ever".

Programmes like this prompt mixed feelings. While confirming what a gift Connolly is to Scotland and the world, they are also a reminder of the day he won't be around. Until then, enjoy.

Series 21 subjects