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'I'm only gonnae show you this once' - Billy Connolly's best sketches

The Big Yin's 75 today! To celebrate we're taking a look back at some of his funniest work over the years. Did your favourite sketch make our list?

• 08:58, 24 NOV 2017
• Updated 09:18, 24 NOV 2017

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The Big Yin turns 75 today and we couldn't be more proud of what the Glasgow boy has achieved over the years.

To mark his special birthday three stunning murals of the comic have popped up in the city centre .

And he was awarded his Knighthood just last month from Prince William at Buckingham Palace.

With such a buzz in the air surrounding the Big Yin and the profound influence he has had on comedians across the globe, we've provided a run down of what we believe to be his best sketches to date.

The Crucifixion

Hailed as one of the best depictions of 'real Glasgow', The Crucifixion, in our opinion, is 15 minutes of comedic genius. The story of the girl from Glasgow who made a terrible spelling mistake in the bible during a shift at the printing works has gone down as one of Billy's funniest fables of all time.

Centering around the last supper in The Saracen's Head Inn in the Gallowgate, near the cross, the apostles are awaiting the appearance of 'The Big Yin' while 'drinking wine and tearing lumps off Mother's Pride. With jabs made at both the 'Christians' and the 'Romans' we think this sketch is pure, unadulterated Glasgow.

The dwarf on the bus

The simplicity behind this story truly showcases the Big Yin's comedic abilty. Billy's tale of the dwarf on the Glasgow bus never gets old. He first explains 'There's a difference between a little person and a dwarf - on of them is a f*****g dwarf.' before quoting the 'big, Glasgow wummin' giving the dwarf a piece of her mind, 'As a matter of fact when you go home tonight I hope Snow White kicks yer a***.'

Glasgow Terrorist Attack

Billy has always been a proud Glaswegian - and no prouder when he heard about John Smeaton's reaction to the suicide bomber ploughing into one of the main entrances of Glasgow Airport. Those responsible for the attack are, off course, the butt of this joke. From the 'suicide bomber instructor' who maintains, 'Right - am only gonnae show you this once' to the attackers themselves.

'What were they f****** thinking, bringing terror tae Glasgow. . . you should have known better than that, we don't mind a bit of terror in Glasgow.'

'Religious fanatics? I'm not sure about religious fanatics without a f****** football team.'

'The next time he (Bin Laden) makes a video, we should get one of John Smeaton and send it to Al Jazeera.'

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In pictures: Billy Connolly talks us through his latest art collection

The world has become a brighter place with the release of the Spring 2023 edition of Billy Connolly’s Born on a Rainy Day collection, available exclusively from Castle Fine Art as of yesterday, Thursday March 23.

The six new limited-edition pieces are initially available as framed and unframed portfolios, hand-signed by The Big Yin himself and are presented on 100% cotton deckle-edged paper, float-mounted in black painted and silver foiled pine frames.

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Ahead of the official worldwide launch on March 30, Castle Fine Art is offering collectors the opportunity to pre-order the set of six hand-signed limited edition artworks. Until then, the framed set is offered at a special pre-launch price of £6,250, and the unframed boxed set at £4,500.

Billy launched his Born on a Rainy Day collection with Castle Fine Art in 2012 and it’s proved hugely popular with collectors.

The six new pieces are: ‘Birds on a Wire’, ‘Headrest’, ‘Backseat Driver’, ‘Very Humble Goldfish’, ‘Helping Mummy With Twine’ and ‘A Load of Old Bollocks’.

Watch an exclusive video interview with Billy by Castle Fine Art here - and read Billy’s comments on his latest works below.

A Load of Old Bollocks

Billy was inspired by seeing baskets of balls in design showrooms. He says: “They’re all over the place now. Balls with balls in them; they have string ones and wax ones and ones with spots on them. the balls from fishing nets to keep them afloat.

“And glass ones and wooden ones – they keep them in a big dish in design showrooms, and I’ve often wanted one. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted it for, and it reminded me of one of them.

“I couldn’t think of a name for the piece I started to draw, so I thought ‘A Load of Old Bollocks’ would cover it nicely. It’s a lovely statement – a load of old bollocks. You can say it wherever you like, you can say it about Shakespeare – “what a load of old bollocks!” You can say it about songs, poems – “a load of old bollocks!”

“And it just sums things up. It’s a nice thing, that basket of balls; it’ll never have a use. It’s a load of old bollocks! It’ll never be welded, it’ll never be riveted, it’ll never mean anything to anybody. It’s a load of old bollocks, and it pleases me greatly.”

Helping Mummy With Twine

Billy says: “I start a lot of pieces and go back to them afterwards and see what they remind me of, and this reminded me of my aunt asking me to hold the wool while she made it into a ball.

“I would do this for an hour and a half and as a prize she would let me play with her darning mushroom, a plastic mushroom with a battery in it and you darn socks with it. You put the sock on it so the light was shining through. But I just flashed it. I was an easily entertained young man.”

Very Humble Goldfish

Billy says: “He’s a lovely goldfish. I almost drew him as a diving superstar, the way that dolphins are, but in the end when I looked at him, he wasn’t a diver, he was a goldfish with his big lumpy head, and he was a more humble thing than a diver, and I really got to like him.

“His head would make a splash and the whole thing about the diving is that you mustn’t make a splash unless he did his famous folding head trick!

“I hadn’t seen him in a year or two. I saw him again recently and he blew me away! He’s great. I love his colours and I’ve never done anything else in those Partick Thistle colours”.

Backseat Driver

Billy says: “I’m very fond of him. I didn’t know what it was at first, because it didn’t have legs. It was just a shape. It was like a potato scone, and then I got the idea for the horse and I put a head on it, and the legs, but I couldn’t work out a way to put the legs on his back. So I gave it a rest, I put a little chair in.

“I’ve never tried to imagine him going anywhere. He’s just quite happy where he is. He’s not going anywhere fast, and he knows this. He’s very wise.

“I used to draw lots of blindfolds. I was driven to it and I don’t know why. They don’t mean anything to me, and then sometimes they mean lots of different things. It’s my own little language and I enjoy it and happily other people seem to enjoy it too.

“We had a donkey once, and he just stood. He didn’t go to many places. Donkeys are lovely like that, they just stand, and think. The Glasgow boxer, Peter Keenan, saw himself as a great working class hero, and he was, and he saw me as that as well. He thought I was another kind of him. And he said: ‘I’ve got the very thing for you’. He bred Clydesdale horses and he had a donkey from somewhere. He said: ‘Do you want a donkey?’ and I said: ‘Yeah, I’d love one!’ He gave us a pregnant donkey, and she gave birth to baby Booby. My eldest daughter Cara used to love them.”

Birds on a Wire

Billy says: “I pondered for ages on the title. I didn’t know what it was, but once I finished it, ‘Bird on a Wire’ by Leonard Cohen kept coming back to me with these birds. I tried to get away from it and eventually had to use it. That’s not the same as stealing a song, it’s just borrowing a title. Leonard Cohen was a good man - he wouldn’t mind.

“I went to my doctor in LA once, and about 15 Buddhists all scrambled past me. I got inside and he said: ‘Did you see the Buddhists?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ He said: ‘Did you see Leonard?’. He was one of them. Leonard Cohen was living with the Buddhists.

“The man in the picture is sitting on a seat with his legs dangling over, doing a sort of martial art, and the ball is just a ball. The birds let you know which way is up. If you want to know which way to hang it, the birds are the right way up – my drawings come with instructions!”

Billy says: “This is called ‘Headrest’ because it’s a man on a deckchair – with no headrest. That’s one of the failings of deck chairs, they don’t have headrests – your head goes down the back like his does, which puts you in an ideal position for having your throat cut.

“I love those naughty seaside postcards which often have guys in that position. This guy has had a rotten day at work and has gone ‘OOOOHH!’ as he relaxes in his deckchair. I’m very fond of him, I like that when I draw people, I like them. I like them because they are usually hard-working and innocent people who just know what like it is to work and they know what like it is to rest, and they know what it’s all about. And they’re worthwhile and they’re innocent, and they deserve a great deal more credit than they get.

“There’s a thing about deckchairs that has often frightened me. I remember describing to an audience about my daughter Cara in a deckchair when we were on holiday, and she couldn’t fix it properly. I looked away, and the noise came – crack! It’d fallen down on our fingers, And when I said it to the audience, they all went ‘OOOOOHHH!’ The noise of a thousand people expressing sympathy, it was great!”

For updates on city centre life, follow the #LoveGlasgow hashtag across social media for inspiration, city guides, what’s on listings, days and night out ideas this spring.

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Connolly on the couch

It's hard to think of Billy Connolly silent. Harder still - alarming, even - to think of him silent in a flotation tank: alone with all those stories and all that hair. But some years ago he booked himself a session for the hell of it, or because he lived in California, or because his wife told him to, and after half an hour in the mineral bath, naked in the blackness, listening to piped whale noises and his beating heart, he had a sense there was someone else floating there next to him.

It took him a moment to realise, he says, wild-eyed, that the someone was just a voice in his head. And then that it was a voice he'd heard often before. The voice was responding to the little plans he was making, the daydreams he was drifting into and it was saying, ' No, you'll never do that. No, you're not good enough, not clever enough, you'll never go there .' It was a voice, he says, that sounded just like the aunt who brought him up by beating him up, the teachers who always called him thick. Perhaps even of the mother who abandoned him at the age of three and the father who sexually abused him for five years from when he was 10. He jokes about it now but he believes, too, that voice will never really leave him; he sees his life as a series of different strategies for learning to live with it. Not least of these was the tried-and-tested one he employed in the tank itself: 'Away with you!' he yelled. ' Fuck off! '

I heard Connolly tell this story on stage in Dublin a couple of weeks ago. The following morning he repeated a more thoughtful version of it to me in our interview. He explained how he could laugh about what his wife, Pamela Stephenson, now a Hollywood psychologist, calls his 'abandonment issues' - he loves the phrase - partly because he felt he had finally got those issues under control.

The flotation tank was just a tiny part of the therapy which he has put himself through since his father died in 1989, in a bid to lay his demons to rest. The process has been 'like someone telling you there's no such thing as ghosts, and you can go to sleep,' he says. 'And you realise you must never make decisions in your life based on that negative voice in your head. And also that so many people do just that. You must always instead go with your primary thought, your hopeful thought. And that's what I try to do.'

Living by hopeful thoughts has made Connolly who he is today, and that person is far removed from the little boy lost who survived a disturbing childhood in a Glasgow tenement; it is a considerable way, too, from the banjo-playing storyteller who first made his name in the city's folk clubs and came to London to meet Parky. Sixty next year, with a pink goatee and rattleskin boots, a Beverly Hills mansion and an estate in Aberdeenshire, Connolly has the evangelical aura of a man who has escaped his fate, and he is justifiably pleased with himself for it.

He speaks, with only a little irony, of Buddhist meditation as one of the joys of his new life and, laughing, of how Shirley MacLaine came up to him recently after a show to tell him how 'centred' he was. By rights, he might have been a sadder figure, drunk and embittered by the sins of his father and mother, but he never really fancied martyrdom. His early stage act, he says, was one way of escaping from 'my life, from my house, from my background', making of himself the 'Big Yin' (the name he originally applied to Christ in his wonderful Glaswegian version of the Last Supper). Since he met Pamela Stephenson, he has found new ways of sorting things out.

If you were to blank out the cynical voices in your own head, you might see 'Pamela and Billy in Hollywood' as one of the great love stories of our time.

The pair met when Connolly was still a spectacular drinker, an unreconstructed spinner of wild tales, a wearer of banana-shaped wellies. He was married, badly, to Iris, who he'd met while he was a welder in the Clydeside shipyards. He had two children, a son and a daughter, 'but emotionally, physically,' he says, 'our whole lives had fallen to bits.'

He was on the road much of the time, but was never very good at picking up women. He could make them laugh, but he never worked out the signals: 'I never knew when to make a move. I'd end up laughing with them all night and find out we'd become friends, which I didn't particularly want. I mean, I had lots of friends already.'

It was the same story initially with Stephenson, who he met when she interviewed him wearing a set of Janet Street-Porter teeth for Not The Nine O'Clock News. 'The thing between us was immediately apparent to her,' he recalls. 'But I took a lot of convincing.' Finally, though, it became 'hot and heavy' and he walked out of his first marriage and, eventually, his first life, after a long custody battle, taking his two children with him - and, over the years, adding three more daughters with Stephenson.

In many ways, you guess, his second wife was the first person who ever really got through to him. Connolly talks about himself as being on 'permanent transmit', never having quite mastered 'receive' - Stephenson puts it down to Attention Deficit Disorder - and, to prove the point, all the while he is talking, smiling, laughing at his own jokes, his eyes are darting about your face as if anxiously looking for clues.

I wonder when he became aware of his new wife's 12-step plan to put his life on track.

'I don't know,' he says, tickled by the idea. 'I mean she was very subtle about it, just my pal, really. Don't get me wrong, Iris was a very nice woman, but this was, from the outset, a different kind of relationship. With Pam, I discovered that you could not get away with anything. Could not get away from her intelligence. There were always so many whys going on. And I thought, Oh God , you know. I had to own up to everything, which no one had ever asked me to do before.'

Once Connolly started being honest with his wife, he found, too, he believes, that he could be honest with himself. 'And then it all tumbled out,' he explains. 'I'd always been open to change, and she showed me how I might go about that.'

The ways in which he went about it are the subject of Pamela's Stephenson's book, Billy, which is an engaging mix of biography and case study. For Connolly, the book was partly prompted by a desire to put the record straight. He's been smarting ever since an unauthorised life by Jonathan Margolis ('all based on press cuttings,' he says, 'from generations of Scottish journalists who were only too happy to weary willie about me') came out, and he's been wanting ever since to get his side across. Mostly, though, he says, 'it was incredibly good for Pam, because she was dying to do this wee shrinky look at me'.

And how did he feel about that, being on his wife's couch?

'Oh, I loved it,' he says, laughing. 'I'm a work in progress, me.'

The things that tumbled out from Connolly for his wife to analyse were the stories of his childhood, some of which he'd hinted at on stage, many of which he'd kept to himself.

He was born in 1942 and, soon after, his father went away to Burma in the war. When he was three and his sister, Florence, was five, his mother, long unable to cope, simply locked the door on her children and walked out, never to return. After some time - perhaps days - fending for themselves, the children's crying was heard by neighbours, and eventually they were taken in by their father's sisters, Mona and Margaret. Mona in particular, who was subsequently admitted to a psychiatric home, physically and verbally attacked Billy from the outset.

When Connolly's father returned from the war to the live in the overcrowded flat, he came home drunk most nights to share a sofabed with his son. For a period of around five years, Connolly says, his father, a fierce Catholic, 'interfered with him' - a secret he did not share with anyone until the day of his father's death, when he broke down and told his wife.

In her book, Stephenson sets these facts down sympathetically and draws more general truths from them. The book is dedicated 'To the Connolly and McLean families in the spirit of healing through understanding; and to all families who are divided by religious differences, or who struggle with poverty, abuse or addiction.' At times, as the publisher might say, it reads like Frank McCourt meets Dave Pelzer and becomes a superstar comedian.

So what was the process of writing it, I wonder?

'We just talked and talked and talked.'

How far back could he remember? Did he recall the day his mother walked out?

'I don't remember that moment, no,' he says. 'But I remember being in the house. I remember there being no adult in the house and trying to get by with my sister - you know, trying to keep warm, eating sweeties and all that.'

Some of the most moving parts of the book are the occasions, in his teens and later, when Connolly tracked down his mother, and went to see her in her new life in the Glasgow suburb of Dunoon, where she had settled down and started another family. The meetings left him feeling nothing.

'I really tried to have a relationship of some kind with her,' he says, thinking back, 'but we were always embarrassed with each other. I thought I would love her, I suppose. I invested so much in that. But it was a stupid, ridiculous thing to think. Society tells you mother love never goes away, blah, blah, blah. But it does, of course. When we met, I didn't feel any bond with her, and she didn't seem to feel one towards me. She was a nice enough woman, though...'

Oddly, Pamela Stephenson shares a birthday with Connolly's mother. It's too tempting to think that he found a direct replacement in her, but he resists the idea, even if she phones him up just before our interview to chide him for smoking. A large Cuban cigar lies in its case on the table. He likens their relationship instead to being more like that of great girlfriends.

'It's a bit like one of those very long, very intense female friendships sustained through the length of a huge novel or something,' he says.

His mother, he believes, liked Stephenson: his wife's middle-class assurance allowed her to pitch into his repressed family and try to heal old wounds. 'In fact,' he says, 'I think she liked Pamela more than me. I guess she always found me to be a nuisance, coming out the wilderness.' He throws his head back, laughing. 'My mum wrote me a letter once - hilarious, though she didn't mean it to be. She said [he does his crimped women's voice], "Will you stop telling the truth about your age because I've been lying about mine all these years." She meant it, too.'

When Connolly's mother was dying, he went to see her, but when he got near the house, he felt he couldn't go through with it and turned back. He tells me that his stepsister later said to him at the funeral, 'I hear you were in Dunoon.' He adds: 'Some shopkeeper had told her. And she said that my mother knew I was there. At one point she'd sat up in bed and said, "Billy's here, Billy's coming," or something, apparently.' He pauses, thinks about this scene for a moment. 'So that's extraordinary, I guess.'

The final edit of the book was Stephenson's. His wife, of course, looked for what Connolly calls all that 'from the dark to the light business'. She prefaces the book with a quote from Nietzsche: 'He must have chaos within him who would give birth to a dancing star.' How anxious is he, I wonder, about bringing some of the darker stuff out into the public for the first time?

'Well, if you are going to do a book about your life, you have to include in it the things that made you what you are. There's nothing particularly joyful or liberating about it. I found it painful to talk about. And then there's the thing about disloyalty. About my father. Because I knew some of the family would take it badly.'

And have they?

'Not yet, but I think they will.'

He's talked it through with his sister Florence, his 'great defender', with whom he retains a strong bond. He's not quite so close to his younger 'brother' Michael, Mona's son, and he worries a little that he will have problems with the book.

'I explained to him about my father,' he says. 'He had no idea. I had to do it on the telephone in the end. I went to his house to say it, but I couldn't get the words out. He wants to see me and talk to me, and I think he'll be fine with it. We're both Celtic supporters and he's a lefty, like me, and a good guy. I hope he'll understand... Anyway, I don't mind the truth. There's a certain ring to it. And people learn to live with it, whatever it is, however hurtful. I've no worries about it.'

Why didn't he confront his father with this truth while he was alive?

'I suppose that's biggest disappointment of my life,' he says. 'It was partly because he was very sick towards the end of his life. But also, apparently, it's typical of guys who went through what I did. It's like alcoholics - they are the same all over the world. So are victims of this kind of behaviour. They all say, "I wish I'd confronted him."'

Instead, he ran through endless scenarios of what he might have said. Did he get to the point in his own mind where he could forgive his father?

'I have no lack of love for my father. I love his memory now, as much as I loved him when he was alive. It was disloyal of him to do that to me. But there were other facets of his character that were great. So you know, you've got to get over it, you've only one life to do it. But still, I kept thinking, if I'm still troubled by this, if I'm still carrying it around like a big rucksack full of bricks and my father's dead, I need someone to tell me how to get rid of this great weight, you know.'

Connolly had spent his life and his career being cynical about the kind of people who had therapy, and the kind of people who became therapists. People used to tell him about Dudley Moore, how he lived in Hollywood and spent all his money on shrinks, and he'd go: 'For God's sake! What's wrong with you? You know, you're funny - get on with it!' But now he speaks with the zeal of the converted. 'A friend of mine was seeing this guy,' he says, 'and Pam just said, "Why don't you go along?" And the first time, it was amazing. I felt so great. Then, after about eight weeks or so, I told him that I found myself trying to think up things to tell him on the way in the car. To make it a bit more interesting. He stood up and said, "You're cured!" And we had a laugh, then stopped it.'

There must have been a fear, I suggest, that once he knew his demons, some of the things that made him who he was, he'd stop being funny.

He likens the process to giving up alcohol: he hasn't touched a drop for 15 years. 'It's like you have to have faith that you are funny first, and then you're drunk,' he says. 'I thought the two would be linked and I was scared. But actually I felt fitter and I thought I was better on stage after I'd stopped drinking. So I started doing other things, too. I stopped smoking and I stopped eating meat. And all of a sudden I became this other guy. I disappeared. I had this 30-inch waist. I have a picture at home and I have a leather suit on and my face is all sunk in, and I look like a cadaver. I thought, "God! Eat something! Chew something!" And I've just gradually got back to my own shape. But it's a good thing to know you can change.'

This literal shape-shifting was, in many ways, the beginning of the end for Connolly and Scotland, or at least for him and the Glasgow tabloids, which have waged a curious 20-year war against him for, well, shaving off his beard, moving to California, making money, not being a welder, becoming teetotal, dining with royalty, marrying a shrink, not being who they thought he was. It's mostly lost-leader syndrome. In many ways, Connolly invented or allowed a new kind of Scottishness, destroyed the shortbread-tin images: it's harder to imagine James Kelman, say, or Trainspotting without him setting the ground rules. But he's hated by some now for having escaped that life; and he hates the Scottish press for judging him, for running front-page stories about his missing mum on Mother's Day, for telling him how he should live. He had, as Stephenson points out, already had more than enough people doing that for him by the time he was in his teens.

When I mention the stand-off, Connolly looks wearied by it. 'I left Scotland because it was time for me to leave in millions of ways,' he says. 'I outgrew it, or at least I outgrew the media. It was becoming very uncomfortable for me. The negativity there felt like a disease, you know.'

He initially went to Hollywood to launch his film career, a career which stuttered before taking off spectacularly with the British-made Mrs Brown (Dustin Hoffman called Connolly's acting, alongside Judy Dench, 'the most exciting male performance of that year'). His forthcoming movie, which premiered in Edinburgh, is a sub- Billy Elliot piece called Gabriel and Me. It tells the story of a family on Tyneside in which the father, unemployed and dying of cancer, takes all his frustrations out on his son. The son (it's slightly better than it sounds) writes to the Angel Gabriel (played by Connolly) to see if he can join up with the celestial host. It was the childhood dream of getting above it all, flying above the city looking down, that I imagine struck a chord with Connolly.

'Aye,' he says. 'It was a bit like that for me. That's what I liked about that movie. I hate my country for the way it holds people back, tells them they're not good enough. I hate the tabloid press for what it does to people. Never letting them be intelligent.' He pauses, catches himself, smiles. 'I hate all those weathermen, too, who tell you that rain is bad weather. There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing .' He laughs, and he's away, doing what he does best. 'It's not just Scotland, it's all of Britain: this negativity. You can see it in the obsession with so-called reality TV. It's donkeys watching fucking donkeys. It's full of people who think you get bright by going to a gym. You know, we seem to have become a country where the highest ambition is to become a fucking television presenter or, worse, a children's television presenter. People who know so much about children that they think they like being shouted at. All those ninnies! Autocue comedians, wearing glasses to look intelligent. I hate it, loathe it.'

He could go on, of course, and you'd like to let him. Connolly rants, anger consumes him but the smile never quite leaves his face. More than the therapy, it is this, of course, that has kept him sane over the years. And it is his rage, lovable and funny, that still makes his stage show a wonder. The previous night, this anger had been directed for two-and-a-half hours without a break at paedophile Catholic priests ('Who do they think they are - Michael Jackson?') and miniature pedigree dogs, begging letters and unionists, teachers and aromatherapists. Billy Connolly has never told jokes, he has just let off steam, and has enjoyed fabulously the process of doing it. Talking about the source of his humour, he says: 'I don't know why I'm funny. But there are reasons for my attitudes. People ask me all the time, "Why are you still angry when you're loaded?" And I don't know. But I like my anger. I've always found it comforting.'

He talks of his stage show in this way as if it were his oldest friend. He used to think he might get the same feeling from films or TV or America, but he seems to have lost a bit of that ambition. He never writes a word of his comedy down and he can, by all accounts, do a run of nights in which he doesn't mention the same thing twice. 'Daisy, my daughter, when she was small, once said I was a "comedium" and I like that, because you don't know where this shit's coming from, you just follow it,' he says. 'I just have lists that say things like "gay mardi gras" or "small dogs". It's all on a sheet of foolscap.'

That piece of paper is the crib sheet to his life's work, a formidable and organic confessional monologue. It is, too - as he well knows - Billy Connolly's one sure survival strategy: his way of always making sure he's had the last laugh.

Stand-up and be counted

Four fellow jokers on why the Big Yin is still king of the comedy pack

Eddie Izzard

Billy Connolly is the Moses of comedy who had Ten Commandments - each one being 'Thou shalt be very fucking funny.'

He helped stand-ups in the UK and Ireland find their own voice, as opposed to being totally influenced by American comics. He was about 10 to 15 years ahead of the scene in the UK. He influenced me hugely and I loved both his style of chatting personally to 2,000 people and of acting out scenes from stories.

He was the first alternative stand-up comedian before there was a 'scene'. There was no one like him. He was playing characters on stage, ad-libbing and changing his material every time you saw him.

I remember falling about on the floor watching Billy doing 'the incontinence knickers' sketch. It was part of a larger piece about Sunday newspapers and the weird adverts they run for useless items. When he applied the idea of incontinence knickers to a 'trendy guy', and then mimed him tying drawstrings around the legs of the knickers, it became absolutely killingly funny.

Billy is that very rare person who, on stage, can create an atmosphere of laughter around him. He has a complete honesty about him and a fluency in comedy that makes the audience believe that he can translate anything into laughter for them. The more comedians you see the more you understand what a rare gift that is.

Most British comedians take themselves terribly seriously, which suggests that they've failed to learn one of Connolly's greatest charms - his absolute refusal to do so.

I remember seeing him on the Parkinson Show in the 70s and other odd clips from the telly of him in his banana shoes. I think his shampoo sketch was the most memorable: 'What's jojoba? Where I'm from that's the month before November.'

I've never met Billy Connolly, but once, while shopping with my wife, I put aside a tie-dyed scarf that I liked. Then Connolly came in, tried on the scarf and said that he'd buy it. The shop owner said it was already spoken for and so Connolly left. Although it was far more expensive than I had thought, I bought it anyway because Billy Connolly had wanted it.

Fiona Allen

I remember watching Billy Connolly as a kid, and being totally bemused by his clothes and hair - I thought he was a mime artist or something.

I loved his sketch about somebody knitting a balaclava for him, and him squinting because the eyeholes were in the wrong place! I laughed out loud and it made my belly ache.

I was once introduced to him by a very boring guy at a party in Los Angeles. I never actually spoke to Billy but was lumbered all night with the boring guy. I was really disappointed.

I'm not a believer in people standing up on stage and copying other people and, anyway, nobody could ever imitate Billy Connolly. Despite his dreadful dress sense, he is brilliantly funny.

Patrick Kielty

When I was 14 or 15 my dad and I listened to a tape of Billy Connolly and for the first time we both actually got the same joke. The sketch was about how 'women demand things - more of this and not half as much of that - and whenever you've met all their demands they'll fucking run away, so stay awake!' Me and dad found this so hilarious that the swearing was overlooked. Connolly has that ability to swear in a very ingratiating way - it's never aggressive and always done with a twinkle in his eye.

Whereas lots of comedians go out on stage with set material and then go off on a tangent from time to time, Billy has a back catalogue so vast and a memory so good that he can be different every night.

But it's his storytelling that places him above all other comedians. Connolly is not afraid to do the old-fashioned jokes sometimes, but he'll tell it like it's some personal life experience of his. I've seen him live a few times and remain in awe of him.

He taught me that you can say literally anything you want to so long as you smile.

Emma Pomfreet

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Scottish comedian Sir Billy Connolly unveils four new drawings for sale

The much-loved comedian, 80, has been a keen artist since 2012. His new artworks are titled Pontius Tries Pilates, One Armed Juggler, Nightmare and Drunk Donkey.

Thursday 10 August 2023 11:49, UK

Sir Billy Connolly has unveiled four new artworks for sale.

The much-loved Scottish comedian, 80, has been a keen artist since 2012, and has unveiled the new drawings through the Castle Fine Art gallery.

The pieces have been launched through his Born on a Rainy Day art series and are being sold for £1,250 each - though they can be bought as a set for £4,500 framed or £3,300 unframed.

The pieces are named Pontius Tries Pilates, One Armed Juggler, Nightmare and Drunk Donkey.

"The Big Yin" said he always wanted to give Pontius Pilate a "keep-fit name", adding the idea came to him when his wife joined a pilates gym.

He added: "I said it would be funny to call it Pontius Pilates, then I thought people would be offended by that, so I fiddled around and I got Pontius Tries Pilates.

"He's just a guy trying at the gym, trying his best. I don't understand the whole gymnasium culture, but he does and he's good."

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On his One Armed Juggler drawing, Sir Billy said: "He's an example of the fact that most of the figures in my work are doing things that don't matter. Just doing the things they do, thinking they'll do you good - I've spent my life doing that."

He added: "You see guys in their 60s out running in the evening and you think: 'Get a chair. Get a chair and a bottle of beer and switch on the telly; who are you kidding?'.

"But all my guys are doing that, they're trying to be part of it wherever 'it' is."

The Nightmare piece is inspired by Sir Billy's own bad dreams, which he says he never really remembers upon waking up.

He said: "But I'm famous for shouting in the night and singing and laughing; my daughter has seen me; I've never remembered it.

"And I was directing a play in my sleep. I was talking to the actors and then I would become the actors, singing songs."

His Drunk Donkey piece hearkens back to his earlier days when he lived in Scotland.

He owned two donkeys who he says he would let "wander about the place eating grass".

The comedian says the animals are "lovely" and "friendly", comparing them to dogs.

He added: "They cling to you, they've got a real tie to human beings. Donkeys are funny animals but it's an endearing kind of funny.

"Our donkeys used to escape over the wall of the garden, run down to the village and the villagers would bring them back.

"Donkeys always look drunk and behave drunk. This one's a friendly looking guy and I think he's been drunk a few times because he's got a beer belly on him. And he's got the drunk legs."

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Sir Billy was first inspired to start drawing while on tour in Canada .

He said: "I'd never drawn in my life until this point, but I just started drawing weird islands and carried on drawing.

"I asked my wife to tell me if they were getting better and she said 'definitely'.

"My manager sent them to the gallery, and now I make pictures and they're lovely to me.

"And the fact that other people like them and want to live with them in their homes blows me sideways.

"To have somebody who wants a part of your mind in their life - I thought my wife had been the only one to fall for that, but it turns out that she's not alone."

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Kirkcaldy's rich history with linoleum explored in new gallery exhibition

The Fife town was the world’s largest producer of the floor covering in the 1920s.

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• Arts and Culture

Kirkcaldy’s rich history with linoleum is being detailed at a new exhibition in the town’s art gallery.

In the 1920s, Kirkcaldy was the world’s largest producer of the floor covering, with no fewer than six manufacturers based there.

That led to the Fife town becoming renowned for ‘lino’ with many locals still remembering the distinct smell it created – which famously was the butt of the joke for Billy Connolly.

These days just one factory remains in Kirkcaldy. Forbo Flooring Systems runs the site built by Nairn’s in 1925, and still employs hundreds of people.

The ‘On Fife’ exhibition is based at Kirkcaldy Galleries, with the building itself actually gifted to the town by linoleum manufacturer John Nairn.

Curator Lily Barnes says she is “really, really excited” to see the presentation open.

She told STV News: “When I first started this job whenever I would talk to people outside of Fife and tell them what they were doing they’d be like ‘why are you working on that, that’s kind of strange’.

“But everybody in Fife gets it immediately, they know exactly what you’re talking about, they can tell you what their Gran did in the industry, what their Grandad did, what their cousins did, everything – they know all about it”.

Amongst the items on display is a piece of linoleum flooring from Paul McCartney’s childhood home in Liverpool.

Another key piece is a fragment with a William Morris pattern on it, designed in the 1870’s and saved from a skip during a home renovation in London around a century later.

One item which has never been displayed before is a mosaic of Queen Elizabeth II, made out of linoleum, presented to the town shortly after her coronation.

Lily added: “The floor covering industry started in Fife in Kirkcaldy in 1847, and it’s had a presence in this town since then – there’s still linoleum made here today.

“From those roots in Kirkcaldy it then spread out across Fife, so linoleum was also made in Newburgh and Falkland.”

Technology has progressed to the point that the one remaining factory in Kirkcaldy no longer produces that distinct odour, but it certainly still produces a lot of linoleum – with some particularly fruitful international markets.

Forbo Flooring Systems’ general manager Angus Fotheringhame said: “We export all over the world, US, Canada, Australasia, Europe.

“For this factory in particular it’s the US that’s the biggest market.

“We make several million square meters every single year.

“We’ve been making linoleum here in Kirkcaldy since 1847 so it’s about 175 years we’ve been doing it, there are many generations of people who have worked here, we’ve got lots of families within the company and a long legacy of staff here in Kirkcaldy.”

Linoleum has left a lasting legacy in Fife, due to the jobs it created, the smells it omitted and a particularly famous Billy Connolly sketch it inspired – saying it will always be a bit of a mouthful.

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