Funny business, biography. There are authorised versions and unauthorised ones. There are hagiographies and hatchet jobs. But a wife writing her husband's life story while hubby is still very much alive, not to say kicking - now where does that fit in to the scheme of things? Will it be a warts-and-all portrait, or a soft-focus snapshot putting the subject's best face forward?
The problem is compounded when the subject is Billy Connolly because, as faces go, Billy Connolly's is more familiar than most. The wild tangle of hair, the mischievous expression, the pointed, faintly demonic beard (which, at 21, earned him the nickname Ho Chi Minh in the Glasgow shipyards) combined with his delightfully OTT taste in clothes - they add up to an instantly recognisable image. Plus, as any fan will tell you, he talks about his life every time he goes on stage - the deprived childhood, the drin-king (his own, and other people's), the holidays by the seaside and all the rest. What could be left to say?
As it happens, plenty. And when the wife is Pamela Stephen- son, herself a feisty ex-comedian who cut her teeth on Not The Nine O'Clock News, and is now a qualified psychotherapist, you'd be entitled to expect a book which provides the best of both worlds - an informed perspective on the comedy allied to a shrewd analysis of the tears of a clown. Certainly, she doesn't shrink from the savagery of her subject's early years. When Connolly was barely a toddler, his mother left home to live with another man. His father was in Burma with the RAF, so Billy and his sister Florence were taken in by their paternal aunts, Margaret and Mona.
Stephenson tries to be fair to the aunts: they did their best for these two "weans" who really weren't their responsibility. Their best, alas, wasn't very good. By page 35, we read: "Billy . . . put his energy into trying to defend himself from Mona's blows by shielding his face and body with his arms. His adrenaline would surge and, although he was no match for her, at least he managed to avoid getting broken teeth. He remembers the blood from his nose dripping onto his feet."
When Connolly pΦre arrived home from the war, things got worse, not better. "Late one night, when Billy was 10, he woke to find his father 'interfering' with him, as he puts it." The sexual abuse continued for four or five years; Connolly kept it secret for another 30, confessing all to Stephenson the night William Connolly died. Why they should choose to reveal it now is something of a mystery, but Connolly discusses it with his customary full-on frankness: "The most awful thing was that it was kind of pleasant, physically, you know. That's why nobody tells. I remember it happening a lot, not every night, but every night you were in a state thinking it was going to happen, that you'd be awakened by it. I would pray for the holidays. I couldn't wait for us to go to the seaside because then we had separate beds."
It certainly puts a whole new slant on those seaside holiday routines. Small wonder that, once old enough to imbibe, Connolly took to alcohol with some enthusiasm - particularly once he had entered the fame game. According to Stephenson, he was terrified of being famous and broke at the same time; in any case, her husband's wayward years provide her with a plethora of hair-raising anecdotes. Some are amusing, such as the time he couldn't find his way out of a London phone box. He called his manager Pete Brown who, apparently unfazed by such a call at two in the morning, pointed out that "there's only four sides, and one's got the phone on it".
Eventually Brown had to get in his car, drive around all his client's usual haunts and drag the comatose Connolly out of his red prison. However, after a few years more of this sort of thing, nobody was amused, least of all Connolly himself, as his diary entries for the latter part of 1985 reveal. October 28th: "I wanted to drink, but I fought it and won." October 30th: "I proceeded to get merrily pissed." November 15th: "Made a total arse of myself. I feel fucking weak and stupid." But the chapter ends on a triumphant note. "Billy finally quit drinking on December 30th, 1985. He has been sober ever since." To be fair to Stephenson, her book doesn't wallow in these murkier waters, nor does she sensationalise what is, unarguably, sensational stuff. Instead she trots briskly through it, and devotes plenty of space to cheerier topics.
Connolly's wacky cousin John, for instance, who used to scare cyclists by driving up beside them in his Bedford van, the door open to reveal a broomstick with a red boxing glove on the end and the word "Biff!" written in white paint on the side. The cyclist usually ended up in the ditch. Music also plays a big part in the story, both in terms of Connolly's devotion to the banjo, his highly successful days with various folk groups - now largely forgotten - and his friendships with such musicians as Gerry Rafferty, Aly Bain, Ralph McTell and George Harrison. All the while she emphasises what she has chosen as the theme for her book: that Connolly has overcome incredible odds and faced down immense traumas in his life, and that his public success, phenomenal as it is, pales beside his victory over his private demons.
Perhaps this is a good enough reason to write his biography - and Billy is likeable and admirable because Billy Connolly is likeable and admirable. Though living with Connolly clearly hasn't always been a barrel of laughs, Stephenson clearly adores him, and the occasional brief glimpses of life chez Connolly, though not always complimentary - he comes across as tetchy, fussy, even paranoid - are endearingly realistic.
When Connolly was given a role in the film The Big Man with Liam Neeson, it was on condition that he get rid of his trademark beard, a decision which caused him considerable agony. One evening Stephenson arrived home to find their three kids going bananas in the house, apparently unsupervised. " 'Where's Daddy?' I asked Amy. 'He's in the bathroom,' she informed me, 'scraping off his fur.' "
But Stephenson often stumbles between the twin stools of wife and author. She can't analyse her husband - at least, not in print - as coolly as a stranger would, and her take on the comedy too often takes the form of repeating his best lines, which is entertaining, but no more enlightening than, say, a Billy Connolly video.
Some speculation about the way in which landscape has informed his comedy would have been a bonus - all those "cold" jokes, culminating in a travel documentary shot on Ellesmere Island and entitled Scot of the Arctic, can't be a coincidence, surely. Instead the book is sprinkled with references to their Hollywood pad, pals and parties. These presumably aim for a tone of casual insouciance, but often don't quite make it: "Oh, look, it's Steve Martin at the dinner table again." All of which is understandable - even if you consider that people who endured similarly abusive childhoods may find the book comforting or inspiring, laudable.
But, on occasion, Billy dips into sheer awfulness. In the early days of their relationship, she and Connolly were, declares Stephenson, "joined at the wound", while his desire to break into the US market is sheathed in a grotesque series of sexual metaphors: "The Viagra he needed for America was some means of raising his professional profile, not his penis . . ." Often the observations are so banal as to be baffling: "Billy thought Richard \ was magnificent, and they quickly became friends . . ." or "Tortured people find each other".
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, for all its good intentions, Billy is a piece of Billy Connolly branding - the sort of thing out of which its subject might well, once upon a time, have mercilessly taken the piss. He'd better be careful. The Billy Connolly kilt-wearing doll, or the box of shortbread with his photo on the lid, might not be far behind.
Billy, by Pamela Stephenson, is published by HarperCollins at £17.99 in UK