IN April 1980 Billy Connolly was photographed (main image, far right) outside Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre, a venue he had often played, having come up with a new idea: a festive panto for the Pavilion. Its title? The Sleeping Dumpling.
“I love pantos,” Connolly said. “I’ve seen them all, but I always liked the ones at the Citizens best. This is going to be like the Citizens’ panto, only rougher. Is it written yet? Don’t be daft - I’ve got better things to do with my time. But it’s going to be fun. We’re starting a company of part-timers for those who are appearing in other shows and want to be in mine,” he added.
“Bill McCue from Scottish Opera has always wanted to be a panto baddie, so some nights there are liable to be two baddies in the show. Mike Parkinson [the BBC chat-show host who’d interviewed Connolly several times] will probably do a walk-on part if he’s free.” He said the panto would be ‘very much’ aimed at children. “I love getting kids involved. Yes, there will be a special panto song, with the words coming down. We can’t leave that out.” The theatre said it would spend more than £250,000 on the panto, which would run from December 4. In the meantime, in June, it would stage a three-week season of Connolly plays - Red Runner. When Hair was Long and Time was Short, and An’ Me Wi’ A Bad Leg Tae.
The Herald didn’t have much time for the opening play, When Hair was Long, describing it as a ‘mediocre play followed by repetitive diatribes on stage by the author’. In the event, the panto, for a variety of reasons, failed to materialise at the Pavilion that Christmas; instead, the theatre staged A Wish for Jamie, with Peter Morrison and Andy Cameron.
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Herald DiaryAs Connolly writes in his recent book, Made in Scotland, two bestselling albums of his live material (which were banned by some radio stations) led to one of his big career breaks in 1975 - the first of his appearances on Parkinson’s Saturday evening chat-show. On it, he dared to tell the joke about the wife and the bicycle. “It’s hard to believe now because it’s a pretty tame wee joke in the grand scheme of things,” he writes, “but in 1975 my bum story took the country by storm ... After my first Parkinson appearance, my concerts began selling out in an instant and I was playing bigger and better venues: King’s Theatre, Pavilion Theatre, Carnegie Hall. I started playing more shows in England and Wales and Ireland, as well as Scotland, and then I started getting international gigs: Australia, Canada, America.”
A measure of his popularity came in September that year, when he played a string of sold-out concerts at the Glasgow Apollo (right, bottom), from the first until the 13th.
The following year he toured Australia for the first time, and was pictured on his return to Glasgow (right, top). He had been dogged over here by protests from Pastor Jack Glass and his followers; his Australian debut, in Brisbane, was disrupted by a ‘bunch of Scottish religious nuts’, he writes. He wondered if his subsequent dates would follow a similar pattern, but the rest of the tour passed without incident.
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