In an age the place our each selfie, photogenic breakfast and “factor I’m ashamed to confess” is preserved eternally on-line, it’s a shock to recall that precise artwork was as soon as disposable – and liable to getting misplaced. Large Banana Toes, a documentary chronicling the Irish leg of Billy Connolly’s 1975 UK tour, was consigned roughly to oblivion when its distributor later went bust, and director Murray Grigor left his personal private copy with a buddy within the US, by no means to be seen once more. Till now: the movie was rediscovered 4 years in the past in an archive on the College of California, and is being re-released by the BFI in a lovingly restored print.
It’s fairly the time capsule, with its infinite fag-smoking and a backstage sequence – oh, the glamour! – that includes Belfast tea girls and their slow-pouring pot of tea. It’s additionally an absorbing portrait of Britain’s most influential comedian as he teeters getting ready to megastardom. Impressed, says Grigor, by DA Pennebaker’s movie of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, Don’t Look Again, it follows the Glaswegian on what was then (shortly after his well-known 1975 Parkinson look) the largest home tour ever undertaken by a solo artist, as he performs first in Dublin then in Belfast. It’s beautiful to see him right here so younger and energetic, palpably a folks’s individual – chewing the fats with soldiers, the assist act, these tea girls – whilst he begins to withdraw, as you’d must, from the rising superstar clamour.
The Belfast gigs are notably noteworthy, as a result of town was a harmful one to go to on the time. Members of a touring cabaret band had been killed in an assault by the UVF months beforehand. Main stars had cancelled the Northern Eire leg of their excursions. Connolly’s insistence that these gigs go forward was a type of cultural lifeline for the province, beating a path the place others might observe.
You’ll be able to watch Large Banana Toes for the socio-politics, then, and discover it fascinating. However you possibly can watch it for the comedy, too – or for the moments the place they meet. At one level, a Belfast viewers member palms Connolly a pink rose. He accepts with gratitude – then mimes the explosion that may ensue (“boooom!”) if the rose in some way hid a bomb. A dangerous gag – however not as dangerous as had he carried out his anti-army tune Sergeant, The place’s Mine in Belfast, which, mid-gig, he opts to not do. I’m not right here to remind them of the Troubles, Connolly later argues, however to make them chortle.
However not simply make them chortle. One of many sights of the documentary is that it finds Connolly at a pivotal second of self-definition. We see a number of interviews with journalists, attempting to pin down the Large Yin phenomenon because it types. One marvels – an indication of the occasions, this – that “you don’t even have an thrilling stage title, you sound just like the boy subsequent door”. Others oblige Connolly to defend the vulgarity that supposedly characterises his routine about swearing on TV (nonetheless a novel thought in 1975), or his tune toying with the delights of the 4-Letter Phrase. It’s a plus ça change second as Connolly – like many a comic book in the present day – advises that individuals who may be offended ought to merely keep away.
Then one other journo pitches in: “Are you a comic or an entertainer?” And Connolly doesn’t have a prepared reply. Each? Neither? “A comic book singer,” he goes for, if solely to get the man off his again. I like that he doesn’t know. This was a time earlier than “standup comedy” had taken its present form, and at the start was commodified and marketed to the purpose of calcification. Connolly clearly didn’t really feel the trendy strain to refine his model, and onstage, he did what he appreciated: politics and ridiculous fruit footwear, soulful ballads like Sergeant, The place’s Mine and standup about farting, all in the identical present. Exhibiting us one thing particular in genesis, again when touring comedy was barely a factor, Large Banana Toes is a superb rediscovery.
