“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” LP Hartley wrote in his novel The Go-Between. The past depicted in Big Banana Feet, a fly-on-the-wall chronicle of Billy Connolly’s 1973 tour of Ireland, is a distant planet.
Connolly arrives in Dublin in the weeks after the Miami Showband murders. The promoter Jim Aiken escorts him from the airport to a hotel room previously occupied by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Rod Stewart and his girlfriend, and Kim Novak. Maybe it’s the aesthetic – with a nod to DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Now, the film-makers Murray Grigor and Paddy Higson rely on natural light – but it’s hard to picture Liz and Dick in these dimly lit digs.
The assembled press seems baffled by Connolly’s presence. “Is he worried that no one will understand his accent?” asks one journalist. Others caution against his supposed vulgarity. “I’ve never been in a city where they warn you so much before you go on stage,” he says. “Even Edinburgh didn’t do that.”
When the Big Yin finally arrives in Belfast, where ladies serve him tea with a malfunctioning pot, he tells the audience that one of his popular songs cannot be played down south because it features the word “bum”.
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Connolly’s pastiche renditions of Oh, Boy and Help Me Make It Through the Night, and his innocent pontifications on willies and drunk Glaswegians, add a bright spark to a gloomy time. David Peat, the film’s cameraman, later revealed that 30 weapons were confiscated from the audience arriving for Connolly’s show.
The comedian is not ignorant of the situation; he simply rises above it in his Edmund Smith-designed banana boots. When a Dublin heckler shouts “IRA”, a bemused Connolly tells him: “That’s really brave. I’d love to see you do that at Ibrox.” Part of his routine concerns the youngsters who get sucked into the British military with promises of skiing and a computer job. The three young RAF fans who surround him at Belfast airport are inclined to agree.
This fascinating, newly restored documentary was believed lost until the archivist Douglas Weir spotted a 16mm print on eBay. It’s a fine tribute to the fearless comedian, who retired after his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2013.
Big Banana Feet opens in cinemas on Friday, May 10th
