A toast to Billy Connolly and the Clydeside trinity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/billy-connolly-clydeside-trinity

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No sooner had our priest declared his Catholic fatwa than I knew I had better be up and about bright and early the next morning for a quick visit to Woolworths. "Billy Connolly's <em>Solo Concert </em>album should have no place in a Christian home," he had said and so obviously I knew I must have this dark work that was causing Rome's foundations to shake.

For the unenlightened, a quick reprise. The album's centrepiece is a long monologue, The Crucifixion, that imagines Jesus as a Glaswegian working man and that, owing to a printer's error, Galilee is named as the venue for the death and resurrection when it really ought to have been Gallowgate in the city's East End. The apostles are foul-mouthed layabouts and the plot roughly follows the last few hours of our saviour before his death. In Connolly's work, the crown of thorns is a "jaggy bunnet". The Glasgow Jesus displays his contempt for Judas Iscariot by abjuring him thus: "See you Judas, you're getting on ma' tits." I recommend it for those seeking an introduction to Connolly's work.

I could never really understand why the churches were so violently opposed to this monologue. In a city notoriously divided by the same religion, Connolly had provided something about which both Catholics and Protestants could enjoy a guilty chuckle and with which others could gently mock the churches' own zealots and fanatics. I also think Jesus himself would have laughed and understood. This is the person who chose as his first miracle to provide an endless supply of booze at his pal's wedding after they had run out. He would have known too that, long before the end of the festivities, the apostles would probably be totally blootered before they even began to dance the horah. So don't even think about telling me the son of God doesn't have a sense of humour.

It's difficult to overstate just how proud many of us who hail from the west of Scotland are of Billy Connolly and what he has achieved in the world. Along with Jock Stein and Jimmy Reid, he is one of the three most important cultural figures to have emerged from Scotland in the postwar period. These were men who, lacking a gilded education, nevertheless emerged from underprivileged environments to become articulate representatives of a class and a culture whose voices had never before been permitted to speak for themselves in those places where influence resides.

Certainly, there had been others who had risen from edgy neighbourhoods to wield power and influence, but there was always a suspicion that they had had to ditch something of themselves to make it through the eye of the needle. In a 10-year period from the mid-1960s though, these three became such outstanding figures in football, radical politics and entertainment that their voices began to resonate beyond these three traditional spheres of working-class influence. And when people listened they heard a wisdom, humour and eloquence that they had previously refused to associate with a Clydeside dialect.

We can only guess at how much Connolly's popularity across the United Kingdom helped break down the national broadcaster's insistence that only those who spoke in the formless and counterfeit cadences of Eton and the House of Windsor were worthy of a microphone. Perhaps Max Boyce and Pam Ayres played a part too. There can be no doubt though that Connolly freed the dialect of the Clyde from those places with which it was normally associated among drunk and violent males.

There is also compassion and warmth in Connolly's observations of his fellow human beings and their adventures and that is what will always lift his humour far above anything produced by Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and those other clowns who earn their money by appearing on each other's quiz shows.

Carr, Gervais and too many of their cronies now think it's acceptable to mock people with mental health problems, such as those who have Down's syndrome, knowing that the objects of their scorn will never have the tools to answer back. This isn't humour, it's simply playground bullying. You would gladly sacrifice a lifetime of pacifism just to be allowed two hours in a locked room with Gervais in particular.

Connolly has had a spikey relationship with the Glasgow media, whom he accused of unjustified intrusion into his private life as his profile began to grow. Since then, there has been a thinly veiled resentment that his frolics with members of the Windsor clan and assorted Hollywood royalty are signs that he has forgotten where he came from. Yet why should he apologise?

He is now also an actor who is held in some distinction in the USA, while he reserves the right to choose the company he keeps. As soon as he embarks on a routine anywhere in the world, he is bringing honour to the city that reared him.

Last week, it emerged that he had undergone treatment for prostate cancer and been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Happily, the operation has been a success, while the Parkinson's is not expected immediately to affect his work, according to his spokeswoman. I hope Billy Connolly will be with us for many years to come and it's slightly wretched that it takes news of his illness to remind Glaswegians such as me how much we owe him.

In conclusion, permit me to commend to you another stanza of his poetry taken from his 1975 work: D-I-V-O-R-C-E, a pastiche and personal tribute to the oeuvre of the much-admired country and western queen, Tammy Wynette. It's about a chap's domestic problems with his wife and dog. Given the nature of his recent surgery, it is an apt verse.

She shouted "get him Rover" and he jumped over and bit my L-E-G.

She sank her teeth in my B-U-M and called me an effin B.

Well I'm telling you, that was my cue, to get O-F-F-ski

And I'm going down to the town tonight to get a new B-I-R-D.

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