ITV’s cuddly Billy Connolly homage missed the point: he’s a firebrand who would be ‘cancelled’ today

The great and good of popular entertainment have been lining up to play tribute to Billy Connolly in an ITV special widely perceived as marking a final curtain in the comedian’s career. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Whoopi Goldberg and Sheridan Smith were among those to pay homage to Connolly during It’s Been A Pleasure.

Connolly, 78, appeared on screen, too, to announce that, after five decades at the peak of comedy, the time had come for his farewell bows. “I have done my stand-up, I did it for 50 years, I did it quite well and it is time to stop,” he said.

“My illness, my Parkinson’s disease, has rendered me different. It would either mean renewing what I do and doing something else, or give up what I did - and that’s what I’ve done.”

This was an extremely moving hagiography. But in framing Connolly as a national treasure, a cuddly comic beloved by fellow celebs and deserving of a Christmas valedictory, It’s Been A Pleasure also arguably did him a disservice.

“Cuddly” is, after all, the last word anyone would have used to describe Connolly during the glory days of his career, through the Seventies and Eighties. Back then he was seen as truly subversive – a firebrand prepared to say the unsayable and to offend polite society. He was the Antichrist of comedy,  deemed to represent a clear and present threat to the purity of the nation.

What other comedian has, for instance, been picketed by Christian evangelicals? Or heckled in the street for suggesting that Jesus had turned up for the Last Supper blind drunk? 

He was an equal opportunities offender to boot. In the Seventies, when jokes about Christianity were verboten, he cracked wise about the Pope and the Apostles. Later, as the comedy landscape shifted, there would be quips about suicide bombers. As recently as 2004, Connolly provoked a firestorm with a “joke” about Kenneth Bigley, a British civil engineer kidnapped and subsequently murdered by extremists in Iraq.

Mileage will vary with these gags. At the time it was widely agreed that he had gone too far with the Bigley routine, in which he told an audience at the Hammersmith Apollo, “Perhaps I shouldn't be saying this ... aren't you the same as me, don't you wish they would just get on with it?”.

The Bigley material – which was followed up with a comment about Bigley’s Asian wife – caused genuine hurt to the kidnapped man’s family. Nor did the subsequent media furore bring out the best in Connolly, who came across as irksome and thin-skinned.

“Don't you feel like a bit of a f***king parasite sometimes? You're f***king slime,” he told one journalist who had the gall to ask why he felt it appropriate to make jokes about kidnap victims and their spouses.

Some comics did defend him. Stewart Lee, for instance, said that while “Bigley’s family, Connolly’s audience and the press have every right to be upset by these lines […] Connolly has every right to say them.”

Lee continued: “To get to bogged down in justifying Connolly’s lines morally and intellectually is to miss a bigger point. Namely, should comedy need to be morally and intellectually justified anyway? What Connolly did at Hammersmith, and did brilliantly, was to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.”

The point is that Connolly clearly did not see himself as a lovable figure, nor the type of performer fit for a primetime lauding on ITV. And his reputation was even more scandalous early in his career, when he went where other comedians didn’t dare venture by mocking Christianity. It’s hard to appreciate today but back then, gags about Jesus and the Apostles were truly beyond the pale.

Connolly discovered this the hard way when a friend made a joke to him about Jesus holding the Last Supper in a Chinese takeaway. Going on stage later that evening, the comic spun the gag into a scenario in which a misprint in the Bible wrongly lists Jesus as having been born in Galilee. In fact, Connolly explained, he was born in Gallowgate in Glasgow – with the Last Supper coming at the end of a boozy night out at the Saracen Head pub.

“Hello there, boys,” is how Jesus greets the Apostles. “I’m knackered...the miracles I’ve done this morning.” Jesus is, quips Connolly, wearing “a long dress and casual sandals,” and the group “sat down at this big table because they were having trouble standing up at this point.”

The routine helped establish Connolly’s reputation as the bad boy of British stand-up. It also caused a great deal of consternation. His own father, a devout Catholic, upbraided his son. People would shout at him in the street. Evangelicals picketed his gigs and pelted the comedian with purses of change – representing Judas’s 30 pieces of silver. His old school in Glasgow went so far as to erase his name from its records, such was the shame.

“I went back to St Peter’s to learn that they had removed my name from the books because I had been doing the religious stuff, the Last Supper and Crucifixion,” he revealed in a BBC series, Billy and Us, which aired last May.

Connolly’s tirades against religions became a talking point all over again in June 2019 when an employee at Asda in Yorkshire was sacked after sharing one of Connolly’s routines. “Religion is over, lads, it’s f***ing over,” goes the skit. “Take your Reformation, your Vatican, your f***ing Mecca, and f*** off. Suicide f***ing bombing - now there’s a bright idea. Every time there’s a bang, the world is a w***er short. F***ing idiots.”

He never expressed any regrets for these routines. Connolly believed he was speaking truth to power, at a time when most comedians were mugging for cheap laughs with racist material.

“I’ve offended most religions,” he said in Billy and Us. “I didn’t set out to do that but they take offence so easily. They are really easy to offend. All you have to do is talk about them and what they do and they will find offence in it. It’s because they know they are a bit ridiculous. You will never hear them saying that, so they will attack you. I don’t mind being attacked by them. […] There’s something quite fascist about it and I refuse to apologise.”

This, surely, is the Connolly who should be remembered and celebrated – not the soft-round-the-edges pal of Paul McCartney and Elton John. In the Seventies and Eighties, when jokes about Christianity were genuinely regarded as beyond the bounds, he was prepared to take risks and mock the absurdity (as he saw it) of belief. How strange that he would end up being embraced by the establishment – the very people he had railed against so effectively and with such heartfelt vitriol.

“He has a genius for inappropriate behaviour,” Stewart Lee wrote of Connolly at the height of the Kenneth Bigley hysteria in 2004. “It’s not such a long journey from what journalists are already calling Bigley-gate, back to Connolly’s 1975 Parkinson appearance when he joked about a Glaswegian man burying his wife with her bum sticking out of the earth so that he would have somewhere to park his bike. Parkinson wept. My mum wet her pants. And, the sterling work of The Beatles and Monty Python notwithstanding, it was finally clear that the 1950s were at last over. It is moments like this that bring the stand-up comedian close to the status of the Holy Fool.”