The 1975 tour documentary Big Banana Feet captures a comic growing into his extraordinary talents – and adjusting to unprecedented fame
In an age where our every selfie, photogenic breakfast and “thing I’m ashamed to admit” is preserved eternally online, it’s a shock to recall that actual art was once disposable – and prone to getting lost. Big Banana Feet, a documentary chronicling the Irish leg of Billy Connolly’s 1975 UK tour, was consigned more or less to oblivion when its distributor later went bust, and director Murray Grigor left his own personal copy with a friend in the US, never to be seen again. Until now: the film was rediscovered four years ago in an archive at the University of California, and is being re-released by the BFI in a lovingly restored print.
It’s quite the time capsule, with its endless fag-smoking and a backstage sequence – oh, the glamour! – featuring Belfast tea ladies and their slow-pouring pot of tea. It’s also an absorbing portrait of Britain’s most influential comic as he teeters on the brink of megastardom. Inspired, says Grigor, by DA Pennebaker’s film of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, Don’t Look Back, it follows the Glaswegian on what was then (shortly after his famous 1975 Parkinson appearance) the biggest domestic tour ever undertaken by a solo artist, as he performs first in Dublin then in Belfast. It’s gorgeous to see him here so young and full of life, palpably a people’s person – chewing the fat with squaddies, the support act, those tea ladies – even as he begins to withdraw, as you’d have to, from the growing celebrity clamour.
