How Billy Connolly won over a Belfast audience at the height of The Troubles

Stepping out of the spotlight and moving to a dark corner of the stage, Billy Connolly picks up a rose that has been placed there by a fan, sniffs it, and then exclaims: “Boom!”

“The whole audience laughs and he has them on his side. He sucked the vacuum of worry away,” explains Murray Grigor, the director behind the footage.

It comes from the rarely seen documentary, Big Banana Feet, which was partly filmed in Belfast in 1975 and came just weeks after the murder of The Miami Showband, a popular cabaret group, at the height of The Troubles.

“It was a terrifying situation and Billy was very jumpy,” recalls Murray. “There was a lot of tension in the hall and in Billy. But he turned all that around and they loved him in the end.”

Billy Connolly documentary

The fly-on-the-wall style film has been rescued and restored thanks to Douglas Weir, the remastering and technical lead at the British Film Institute.

“There are a number of things about the film I think are significant,” Douglas says. “I think the best bits aren’t when he’s doing his comedy routine, but when we see him being treated to hotel suites and private planes for the first time.

“One of my favourite parts is towards the end, when he’s sitting in the dressing room in Belfast preparing to go on. You can tell he’s bricking it. Everyone beforehand was asking him why he was going there. He puts on a brave face but you can tell he’s nervous as he picks at his fingernails, smokes a cigarette and drinks a beer.

“Then there is the seminal moment we’ve heard him talk about in interviews but not seen the footage of very often, when he picks up the rose and pretends it’s a bomb.

“When the audience laughs, he knows they’re with him. He didn’t have to worry about getting shot.”

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Murray had worked with Billy the year before on a short film called Clydescope, which he describes as “basically a tourism film”. It began a friendship between the pair and Murray recalls attending a Humblebums concert in Comrie a short time later.

“The patter between the songs was fantastic,” he recalls. “Then I went to see him at The Welly Boot Show, which he put on at the Edinburgh Fringe. There was a power cut on the night I attended and Billy was asked if he could keep the audience amused for 10 minutes while they tried to sort it. Forty minutes later, he was full steam ahead.”

The Big Yin heads to Ireland

Inspired by the style of the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, Murray went with the Big Yin to Dublin and Belfast to capture the comedian’s first time performing on the island, which came shortly after he had made his debut on Parkinson and found himself becoming a familiar face outside of Scotland.

Over the years, the film has been hard to come by and it was thought the only version available was poor quality copies from an old VHS rental.

It was one of those faded copies Douglas Weir had first watched the movie on, and it prompted him to keep an eye out for an original film reel.

Originally from Glasgow, Douglas moved to London when he was 19 to learn film restoration and has been working in the field for 25 years.

“I’m always on the lookout for films that have gone missing or are forgotten, and this was one of them for me,” he explains.

“Then I happened on a copy about four years ago on eBay. Three reels of 16mm film, listed for £45. The seller had misspelled Billy’s name and banana, so the listing had received no views.”

So how did Douglas discover it?

“I’m dyslexic, so maybe my eBay alert was misspelled as well,” he laughs, adding: “I think I had an alert set up for 16mm film prints – one of many eBay alerts I have.”

Douglas tracked down Murray to tell him he had found the film, then reached out to Billy.

“He and Pamela, his wife, are really pleased we’ve found it and that we’re going to do something with it.”

Restoring the film

The film reels, which had been sent to the Falkland Islands for a viewing – presumably during the war – and never returned, were in better condition than many reels Douglas has worked on.

So began a painstaking process of scanning the film to high-definition quality, cleaning it up, correcting the colour, and finding a new source of audio that was much better than the scratchy, muffled version on the film reels.

He was also able to reinsert a couple of scenes that had been previously cut.

Murray and Douglas will be at the Glasgow Film Theatre next weekend to introduce the first screening of the restored print and to talk about it afterwards.

“When we made the film back in 1975, we sat down with the BBC, who said to cut it down to 30 minutes and take out the bad language. I said, ‘No, let’s put more of that in and turn it into a feature for cinema’,” explains Murray. “It was the best decision I made.”

Big Banana Feet premieres at Glasgow Film Festival on Sunday 3 March and is in selected cinemas from May 10, with a BFI Blu-ray/DVD release on May 2.