BOOK OF THE DAY: STEPHEN DIXONreviews Journey to the Edge of the WorldBy Billy Connolly, 309pp, £20
WE DON’T really do national treasures here, do we? Maureen Potter and Ronnie Drew might have been strong contenders, but each was a bit too down to earth and self-mocking to fit the role. Other possibilities over the years, from Francis Stuart to Hugh Leonard, were probably too strange or grumpy.
Britain always seems to have dozens of national treasures on the go, perhaps because they had a Queen Mum to start the ball rolling, and there is a special category for comedians who, having reached a certain age, begin making television travelogues. Stephen Fry. Michael Palin. Billy Connolly.
Journey to the Edge of the World is the tie-in for Connolly’s new series, which can be seen on Thursday nights on UTV, and which takes the amiable Glaswegian storyteller from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Northwest Passage: Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Baffin Island, the Yukon and British Columbia. It is a very decent book because Connolly, for all his wealth and four decades in the limelight, is manifestly a very decent man.
With text tidied up by writer Wendy Holden, and lavishly illustrated with pictures of Connolly wearing a woolly hat in various freezing locations, the book is certainly a testament to the indomitable inhabitants of these remote places; men and women who have to deal with two months of darkness, nine months of winter, and the occasional grizzly bear.
Curious, receptive and easily moved to tears, Connolly was obviously affected and astonished by much of what he encountered on his epic journey across the New World. At the start, in Nova Scotia, a tone of bleakness is set as he explores the Titanic graveyard, Halifax being the closest place to where the liner went down. Visitors leave little teddy bears and other toys on the grave of the Unknown Child, a two-year-old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy found floating in the icy sea on that terrible day in 1912.
One slight problem with the visual side of the book is that, even though the distances covered are enormous, there is little contrast in the terrain, majestic and awe-inspiring as it is in its isolated vastness. But to these chill places Connolly brings a little welcome warmth, chattering and laughing away with old-timers of Scots ancestry and Eskimos (and, no, apparently Inuits don’t mind being called Eskimos at all) about banjos and sausages and whatever else comes to mind.
From time to time there are diverting musings from Connolly about what it’s like to be a famous comedian and national treasure. One aside concerns his decision, at his wife’s suggestion, to stop being the life and soul of the party at private gatherings and let non-professionals get a word in.
“Now I can’t dominate at a dinner any more; nor do I want to because it is lovely to see how right she was. People flower in the room and I can see them enjoying being in my company and joining me laughing. There’s a lovely thing that happens to comedians: when somebody tells a funny [joke] and I crack up you can see them thinking, ‘Did you see that? Did you see him laughing? I made him laugh’.”
That story says a lot about Connolly’s consideration for others, integrity, honesty – and huge ego, of course. It’s an approach that saves Journey to the Edge of the World from being just another TV tie-in. Connolly seems to be without guile. Or, if he isn’t, and can fake sincerity this well, then he’s a far better actor than anyone has given him credit for.
Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist