In an age where our every selfie, photogenic breakfast and “thing I’m ashamed to admit” is preserved eternally online, it’s a shock to recall that actual art was once disposable – and prone to getting lost. Big Banana Feet, a documentary chronicling the Irish leg of Billy Connolly’s 1975 UK tour, was consigned more or less to oblivion when its distributor later went bust, and director Murray Grigor left his own personal copy with a friend in the US, never to be seen again. Until now: the film was rediscovered four years ago in an archive at the University of California, and is being re-released by the BFI in a lovingly restored print.
It’s quite the time capsule, with its endless fag-smoking and a backstage sequence – oh, the glamour! – featuring Belfast tea ladies and their slow-pouring pot of tea. It’s also an absorbing portrait of Britain’s most influential comic as he teeters on the brink of megastardom. Inspired, says Grigor, by DA Pennebaker’s film of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, Don’t Look Back, it follows the Glaswegian on what was then (shortly after his famous 1975 Parkinson appearance) the biggest domestic tour ever undertaken by a solo artist, as he performs first in Dublin then in Belfast. It’s gorgeous to see him here so young and full of life, palpably a people’s person – chewing the fat with squaddies, the support act, those tea ladies – even as he begins to withdraw, as you’d have to, from the growing celebrity clamour.
The Belfast gigs are particularly noteworthy, because the city was a dangerous one to visit at the time. Members of a touring cabaret band had been killed in an attack by the UVF months previously. Major stars had cancelled the Northern Ireland leg of their tours. Connolly’s insistence that these gigs go ahead was a kind of cultural lifeline for the province, beating a path where others could follow.
You can watch Big Banana Feet for the socio-politics, then, and find it fascinating. But you can watch it for the comedy, too – or for the moments where they meet. At one point, a Belfast audience member hands Connolly a red rose. He accepts with gratitude – then mimes the explosion that would ensue (“boooom!”) if the rose somehow concealed a bomb. A risky gag – but not as risky as had he performed his anti-army song Sergeant, Where’s Mine in Belfast, which, mid-gig, he opts not to do. I’m not here to remind them of the Troubles, Connolly later argues, but to make them laugh.
But not just make them laugh. One of the attractions of the documentary is that it finds Connolly at a pivotal moment of self-definition. We see several interviews with journalists, trying to pin down the Big Yin phenomenon as it forms. One marvels – a sign of the times, this – that “you don’t even have an exciting stage name, you sound like the boy next door”. Others oblige Connolly to defend the vulgarity that supposedly characterises his routine about swearing on TV (still a novel idea in 1975), or his song toying with the delights of the Four-Letter Word. It’s a plus ça change moment as Connolly – like many a comic today – advises that people who might be offended should simply stay away.
Then another journo pitches in: “Are you a comedian or an entertainer?” And Connolly doesn’t have a ready answer. Both? Neither? “A comic singer,” he goes for, if only to get the guy off his back. I love that he doesn’t know. This was a time before “standup comedy” had taken its current shape, and before everything was commodified and marketed to the point of calcification. Connolly clearly didn’t feel the modern pressure to refine his brand, and onstage, he did what he liked: politics and ridiculous fruit footwear, soulful ballads like Sergeant, Where’s Mine and standup about farting, all in the same show. Showing us something special in genesis, back when touring comedy was barely a thing, Big Banana Feet is a great rediscovery.
Big Banana Feet is released by the BFI in selected cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 10 May and on DVD/Blu-ray from 20 May
