In Scotland, saying you don’t like “Billy” is almost as bad as saying you don’t like “Nicola”. It’s just not done; it’s disloyal and will incur hysterical tweets accusing you of being anti-Scottish.
Well I do like Billy, but that didn’t stop me feeling bored and disappointed by his new series, Billy Connolly’s Tracks Across America (STV).
He tells us he’s lived in America for nearly half his life but hasn’t seen the nooks and crannies of the place. The country is so vast that travelling within it calls for aeroplanes not buses or car journeys where you can gawp out of the window and enjoy the scenery. Instead you’ll see gleaming airport terminals and queues. So he’s setting off across his adopted country by train, going at his leisure and stopping off at quaint little towns to perhaps learn something of the real America.
His chosen route for this first episode was Chicago to Seattle which took him across the Great Plains, those grasslands which lie waiting for a powerful silver train to slice its way through their endless, yellow landscapes from where America’s gets its corn and wheat. Here the land is something to be marvelled at whereas British train journeys regard it as a thing to be endured, struggled through and grumblingly delayed upon.
In Connolly’s narration, his broad Glasgow accent seems to have mellowed with years of American living and he talks of “Minnesorra”, “Dakorra” and ”Seaddle” but then then words like “skite” shove their way in and ruck up any American cool. He’s still the Big Yin – just a well-travelled, cosmopolitan one, and good luck to him.
Stopping at Minnesota with its 27 million acres of corn, he takes in the huge State Fair. Watching the locals waddle past, gnawing on sticks – corn on a stick, pig on a stick, hot dog on a stick - he marvels that “Americans have got a strange attitude to food” but they could surely the same about us with our penchant for stuffing a sheep’s tummy with blood and oats, or plunging everything into the deep fat fryer.
He departs Minnesota having looked at state fairs, pigs and burgers - all Mid-West clichés - and there was nothing new or fascinating here. He may as well have stayed on the train for his next stop which was a ruined town in North Dakota. It was booming when oil was at its peak but now it’s dreary and exhausted. Yet that too is an American cliche: the ghost town whose streets are haunted by tumbleweed. The only bright spot here was a cheerful woman who suggested the town look to another energy source, perhaps “nuckular or something from outer space.”
Moving on to Glasgow, Montana, he finds Elvis-obsessed locals who aren’t quite sure if they’re Glaswegian or Glasgonian. One woman remarks that she has ancestors from Norway which would surely make her a nicely rhyming Norwegian Glaswegian…
So this travelogue, which purports to show the hidden America, was exceptionally tame. It didn’t reveal secrets. Rather it just confirmed American stereotypes: the ghost town, the Elvis nuts, the heart-quashing burgers, the fat yokels at the State Fair. The US equivalent of this show would be like Jerry Seinfeld visiting Scotland with a camera crew and asking to be shown Brigadoon.
But it’s Billy and we love him, so what went wrong? Maybe it’s his illness, which he wasn’t afraid to discuss, remarking that train travel presents difficulties: “People with Parkinson’s should not have showers on trains as much the same way as Vietnam veterans shouldn’t go to fireworks displays in swamps.” Maybe it has, understandably, drained some of his energy and swagger? He tended to hang back and observe instead of galloping into the crowd to strike up conversations. And when he did engage he was a gentle, mild interviewer instead of a rambunctious Louis Theroux, keen to ferret out the oddballs and hear their brilliant, terrifying stories.
It was lacklustre, slightly dull and often melancholy, but was I sad for the dismal Americans or for this pale version of Billy Connolly?
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here