Of course, it's popcorn snortingly funny but this re-discovered film of Billy Connolly's 1975 Irish tour, Big Banana Feet, is also a fascinating time capsule of Ireland - North and South.
Originally released in 1976 but rarely seen since, director Murray Grigor's document of Billy Connolly’s first-ever gigs in Dublin and Belfast is as funny as you might expect but it’s also a fascinating look back on a very different Ireland.
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Now re-discovered and restored by the British Film Institute, it captures the Glasgow livewire as he debuts his outsized banana boots, made especially for Connolly by Scottish pop artist Edmund Smith, at a one-off show at Dublin’s Carlton Cinema and two nights at the ABC Cinema in Belfast at the height of The Troubles.
Shot in the same rough and ready style as D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back, the camera is never off Connolly. There he is dying of a hangover and nursing a glass of Smithwicks in a pub off O’Connell Street, joshing with the tea ladies at the Carlton, joking about with Scottish members of the 15th Parachute Battalion at Aldergrove Airport, effortlessly batting off hecklers, and swapping banjo tips with his Dublin support act Spud, the Irish band briefly managed by Paul McGuinness before he alighted on U2.
Then 33, Connolly still seemed unaware of just how raw and hilarious his anarchic, freewheeling stand-up style really was. In Grigor’s film, we can almost see a comic genius being born on stage, in between skit songs on banjo and guitar (he topped the UK Singles Chart with his song D.I.V.O.R.C.E. the same year).
Of course, it's popcorn snortingly funny but it’s also a fascinating time capsule of Ireland north and south. Having been warned not to play Belfast, he is noticeably nervous before he takes to the ABC stage - as he remarks ruefully, "I’ve never been in a city where they warn you so much before you go on stage. Even Edinburgh didn’t do that."
Gazing out the window on the flight from Dublin to Belfast, he muses, "You wouldn’t think such a violent place to be kind of pretty" but this former shipyard worker of Irish extraction doesn’t shy away from engaging side-on with the sectarian violence out on the streets.
On stage, he wonders why young men join the army before performing Sergeant, Where’s Mine?, his own song about The Troubles. The funniest scene in the whole film arrives when he bends down to accept a bushel of roses from a well-wisher in front of the stage...
From the scatological (you want jokes about musical farts, he’s got 'em) to the political, this is a compelling and hilarious snapshot of a man on the verge of comedy superstardom.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan
