People

The Big Yin

[ 5 Dec 02] Finished reading Pamela Stephenson's biography of her hairy husband a couple of days ago, which a year after publication is still one of the bestselling books in the land. That's hardly surprising—Billy Connolly is a funny man—but I wonder whether Billy is everything its half a million purchasers hoped it would be.

A book written by his spouse, and an ex-comedian spouse at that, promises a rare insight into the man and his muse—even more so when we learn that nowadays she works as a shrink. But although there's plenty of insight here, and an obvious affection and sympathy for her subject, there's also something missing.

The book is strong on Connolly's Glasgow childhood; it's heartbreaking to read of his abandonment by his mother, abuse by his father, hectoring by his aunts and teachers, and impoverished surroundings. It's also strong on his early working life in the shipyards and the territorial army, where he gained in confidence and independence of spirit. Stephenson's account of these formative experiences certainly benefits from her position as partner of twenty years' standing and as a trained psychologist, even if the occasional slip into shrink-speak does seem out-of-place in a showbiz biography. The prose is too pedestrian in places, but Billy's story is compelling enough to overcome that.

The book is strong enough, too, on the past twenty-odd years, the years when Stephenson has known and lived with Connolly. Since he was already one of Britain's most successful comedians when they met, this is standard career-highlights fare, full of tours, TV work, and movie roles—the work of an assured performer who has grown comfortable with success and come to terms with his demons.

The problem is the decade or so in-between: the late 1960s through 1970s, when Connolly went from banjo-playing with folk bands in small Scottish clubs to selling out nationwide tours as a comedian. The essential outline is there, but what's missing is the how—how did this mad-looking Scot grab Britain by the lapels and shake it up so much with laughter that it couldn't breathe? How did he take off? What was so funny about Billy Connolly?

For a book about a comedian by a comedian, there's surprisingly few laughs in Billy. Hardly any of his actual material is present. When we do read his words, they're earnest early-1980s diary entries about his efforts to kick the booze. Apart from a few passing references to famous Connolly subjects—diced carrots, for example—it's almost impossible to learn from the pages of Billy what his comedy is about. All we learn about is the overall trajectory of his success.

For most readers, I guess, that will be enough. They'll already own his records and videos; they'll already know just how funny he is. Even though I don't own any Connolly product, I too can remember listening to a friend's tape of the 'pink milk' routine again and again on teenage camping trips (which often involved beverages just as bad), and laughing so hard at a routine about incontinence pants on TV one New Year's Eve that I thought I would suffocate.

But it's surely a missed opportunity to have next to none of that in what is, after all, a lasting record of the man. And by not showing us just how funny he is, Stephenson doesn't fully explain how he rose to fame—which is usually the most interesting aspect of any showbiz biography. Yes, he had a terrible childhood, and some of his enormous drive to perform must have been a drive to overcome it—but so did many other people, and they're not famous comedians.

Stephenson's own background and unique relationship with her subject, which elsewhere in the biography are strengths, may here be the problem. She met Connolly on the set of Not the Nine O'Clock News, the series that had turned her, a recent immigrant from Australia, into British television's latest comedy sensation. As one who has herself experienced sudden fame, she may not have felt the urge to explain her husband's own that an 'ordinary' biographer would have. (The constant name-dropping in the latter part of the book suggests that her own sense of the ordinary has been skewed by two decades of success.) And, as one who didn't live in the UK when his rapid rise occurred, she doesn't have personal experience of having watched it happen—of having been part of a national audience whose preconceptions about regional comedians were being so comprehensively overturned by this man. Neither do I—which was why I wanted to read Billy.

It's understandable that a psychologist would focus on her subject's childhood, and that a second wife might not want to dwell for too long on the years when he was married to his first. But the result is that, even though it's readable and entertaining enough, Billy isn't everything it could have been—which you certainly couldn't say about the man himself.

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He Dwindles in the Distance

[20 Nov 02] The trouble with reading 180-year-old essays and wanting to link to them online is that they aren't always available, or available in a screen-friendly format. The upside is that because they're in the public domain those problems are easily solved. Here, then, is William Hazlitt's On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority.

Don't let the haughty title or dated references put you off; try reading it with weblogs in mind. (More Hazlitt.)

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[23 Sep 02] You could forgive Jerry Seinfeld for feeling that he has nothing left to prove after the success of his Show About Nothing. But apparently he's spent the last few years re-inventing his act, which is also the theme of his forthcoming movie Comedian:

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That's how you know you're still alive. Once you start doing only what you've already proven you can do, you're on the road to death.

[Thanks, provenance: unknown.]

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[11 Apr 02] Jonathan Ross meets Alan Moore: "when Idler HQ asked me if'd like to meet the great and beardy one, I rushed at the chance like Charlie Sheen at a porn starlet."

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Goodbyee

[28 Mar 02] A world without the Goons, Graham Chapman, Douglas Adams, and now Pete and Dud. Dudley Moore is being remembered today for 10 and Arthur, but I'll remember him more for being half of one of the funniest comic duos of the 1960s. Cook may have been the driving force behind the sketches, but Dud was the musical force behind unforgettable tunes like 'Isn't She a Sweetie', 'Lovely Lady of the Roses' and 'Goodbyee'. It's a continuing annoyance to me that their classic Not Only... But Also albums and later ones like Good Evening aren't available in their entirety on CD. The world deserves a digital audio version of the Frog and Peach sketch.

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[ 7 Mar 02] "There is very little of his work that is easy, conventional or blandly acceptable. It's all so Spiky."—Michael Palin on Spike Milligan.

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Gunner Milligan: His Part in My Downfall

[27 Feb 02] It takes a fair bit to make me laugh out loud at comedy on TV or on stage; I'm more a smiler and a silent chuckler. Makes me a terrible audience member at comedy shows, even though I usually enjoy them.

The number of times I've laughed to the point where I couldn't stop, to the point where my sides ached and my eyes were awash, is so small I can just about count it on one hand. The number of times I've done that in an audience is exactly once: when watching childhood hero Spike Milligan at Hobart's Theatre Royal at the age of sixteen.

I can't remember the jokes; all I remember is Spike having to come back again and again to satisfy the cries for encores. By the end he was sitting on the edge of the stage just talking about nothing, about uneventful bus trips and such, and we were still entranced. I doubt there was a single person in the audience who wanted to go home that night.

Spike was simply the best there was. You rotten swine, you deaded me, and now you're dead.

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The Gospel According to Phil

[13 Feb 02] The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick [via LMG] is a very readable synthesis of the science fiction author's life-changing experiences of '2-3-74', written in comic book form by Robert Crumb. As with other evidence of Dick's strangeness, what I'm struck by is not so much what a weirdo he was—although he certainly was wonderfully weird—but the sense I get from all of his writing that there was a remarkably sane 'essence of PKD' observing all of this weirdness from inside and beside himself, and reporting it to the world. We get to read sane Phil's reports on insane Phil, if you like. More often than not it makes for enthralling reading.

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