The Times - UK (2021-12-21)

2 Tuesday December 21 2021 | the times

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Still, I’ll not be

tucking into octopus

again — not that I do

more than once a year.

It helps that I don’t like

the taste of elastic

bands, but mainly the

revelation that humans

and octopuses share

a common ancestor

convinced me to lay off

the suckers. I draw the

line at cannibalism.

farms to breed

octopuses for food,

and critics say it’s

cruel because of the

creatures’ high

intelligence. A bit

dodgy, that argument:

there are several

perfectly respectable

reasons for humans to

eat other animals, but

their being thick is not

one of them.

Poodles too. Those

velociraptors in

Jurassic Park. But not

octopuses. Or is it

octopi? They probably

know the answer, but

doubtless they’re too

busy solving octratic

equations with all eight

arms to let me know.

The question arises

because aquaculturists

are close to developing

I didn’t know that

octopuses were

clever. I know crows

are. And dolphins. And

foxes seem smart.

No more

octopus

for me

Robert Crampton

I don’t watch Strictly,

but 12 million people

do, so it’s a decent

barometer of public

opinion. The reading

I get is that the Great

British public admire

those who overcome

adversity and don’t

much care who

anybody else chooses

to sleep with. Hence

the popularity of the

actress Rose Ayling-

Ellis, who is deaf, and

John Whaite and

Johannes Radebe, who

are gay. Ayling-Ellis

won, the guys came

second, congratulations

all round.

Over at Sports

Personality of the

Year, Emma Raducanu,

a Brit of Chinese-

Romanian heritage,

took the top prize and

Tom Daley, another

gay man, came second.

I reckon all these

individuals did well on

merit, not because

voters wanted to big up

diversity. I also reckon

the results are an

indication that the

public is far more

comfortable with

difference than some

commentators would

have us believe.

As long ago as 1976,

the figure skater John

Curry, not long before

being outed as gay, won

Spoty. Almost a quarter

of the winners have

been people of colour.

I’m not saying prejudice

wasn’t or isn’t there, but

the bigots may be more

noisy than numerous.

I

love the fact that

the professional

darts player

Fallon Sherrock

is not averse,

as she disclosed

in a recent

interview, to

occasionally hustling

unsuspecting punters

at the oche in

her local in

Milton Keynes.

Last month

Sherrock reached

the quarter-final at

the Grand Slam of

Darts — the first

woman to progress

so far in that

tournament. (Less glitteringly, on

Sunday night she lost in the first round

of the PDC World Championship,

despite the crowd at Alexandra Palace

being on her side.) And yet, once in a

while, masked up with her distinctive

long blonde hair tucked into a beanie,

she’ll accept a challenge in the pub.

Given that she has a legendary 170

checkout (treble 20, treble 20, bull to

finish) on her CV, she tends to wipe

the floor with anyone daft enough to

try their luck. “Just for a fiver. Or a

drink,” she explained.

There’s something ineffably cool

about a hustle, isn’t there? Hence the

popularity of movies such as The

Hustler and The Color of Money. It can

go badly wrong, though. There’s a

scene in the Farrelly brothers’ 1996

comedy Kingpin where the bowling

experts played by Bill Murray and

Woody Harrelson are rumbled by

their victims and Woody ends up

losing his hand. I seem to remember a

story about Robin Hood getting nicked

by the Sheriff because he couldn’t

resist the lure of an archery contest at

Nottingham castle. Mind you, that

one’s made up. Well, actually, the

others are too, but you take my point.

I’ve always wished that I had a

secret expertise I could surprise people

with, either for money or just to

impress them, but a wish is what it has

remained, given the minimal effort I’m

willing to apply. Chess would have

been a possibility (some hustlers in

New York City make a decent living at

it) — I played for the East Riding of

Yorkshire at the national schools chess

championship in Wolverhampton in

1975, when I was ten. Won two, drew

two, lost two. Unfortunately, that was

my peak. Similarly, my pool and table

football abilities have been in decline

since university, and I wasn’t much

good then.

Dominoes has too much luck

involved. Same goes for boxing —

and anyway, I’m too old to go around

challenging strangers to a punch-up.

Hustling people at cards is called

cheating and they tend to get angry. I

can’t do anything cool like acrobatics

or juggling, or even wiggling my ears.

I’m pretty good at general knowledge

quizzes, though. Indeed, there are

individuals, some of them once

Mastermind contestants I believe,

known to hustle on the pub quiz

circuit. But besides the contests

being time-consuming and a bit

tragic, the rewards are pretty scant.

The one thing I’ve done that is

unusual and which I wasn’t bad at was

going synchronised diving with Tom

Daley for a feature. Yet it’s hard to

imagine a scenario in which I could

inveigle a stranger into betting big

money on my being crap from the 5m

board, then rounding up young Tom,

finding a suitable pool, getting into

the Speedos, doing the routine,

triumphantly proving slightly better

than I was expected to be, collecting

the money etc... it’s not a runner is it?

Believe me, Fallon, you’ve got it easy

with just three darts and a board.

When

bigots are

outvoted

Fallon Sherrock is cool

— who doesn’t long to

have a secret hustle?

I can’t write, I

Billy Connolly talks to Andrew Billen

about outrageous comedy, living with

Parkinson’s (and what his wife does for

him) and why the end doesn’t scare him

H

e knows that there

is no longer a

consensus behind

this, but Billy

Connolly believes a

good joke smashes

every objection. He

has just told me a

potentially objectionable joke built on

the c-word. He half-told it a bit earlier

but broke off so he could return to it

and get the pay-off exactly right. The

joke’s first sentence begins with the

c-word and it is repeated three more

times before the punchline, which is

the c-word.

“It always gets a huge reception,” he

says after I have laughed more than

I should. That’s because he is Billy

Connolly and can get away with

anything, I protest. He disagrees.

“Everybody can if they do it right. You

just barge into it and do it right. People

will laugh in spite of themselves.”

The great storyteller recalls a night

of involuntary laughter in Swindon

years ago. “It was going really well.

I was flying and there was a man in

the front row, with his wife on his left,

and he was out of control. He’d

stopped laughing and started making

a funny noise... ”

Connolly makes a moaning sound.

“And he was sliding feet-first off his

chair and his wife was holding him by

the shoulders and he ended up on the

floor. And he was going... ”

His moaning goes up a pitch. “I

stopped the show and said, ‘Look at

this guy.’ And everyone was laughing

and he was trying to get up and he was

struggling around. And I said, ‘Do you

think it’s over?’ and I went over to him

again and he went... ”

Connolly does a deep, guttural

death rattle. “And he slid down again.

I was merciless. I just went for his

jugular and floored him completely. It

was like a bullfight. I waved the cape

and stabbed.”

It is a year since Connolly, who was

diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in

2013, retired from stand-up comedy.

Today, having recently turned 79, he is

not even sitting up for our interview.

Our Zoom call is audio only, but he

tells me that he is in a black T-shirt

and tartan pyjama bottoms lying on

a couch in the Florida Keys in one of

his daughters’ homes. How would he

describe his mental state? “Perfectly

cheery,” he says.

Does he make jokes about

Parkinson’s? “I don’t joke about it, but

I’m light about it. I tell people it’s not

much fun and every day is different

and you lose something on a regular

basis. You lose the ability to play

music. You lose the ability to smoke a

cigar. You can’t yodel any more. I used

to love yodelling like Hank Williams.

I can’t do it any more. I can’t write any

more. My writing is an illegible mess.”

The thing is to stay ahead of it. He

can still draw — since 2012 he has

been a regularly exhibited artist —

and when his drawing hand shakes

he shames it into stopping. “I point

with my index finger on the other

hand and it stops instantly.”

In ITV’s Boxing Day documentary

Billy Connolly: My Absolute Pleasure

he looks well and certainly cheery. He

tours a farmers’ market with his

daughter Scarlett and stops for a selfie

with an importunate fan in a

wheelchair. He says people are

incredibly nice to him, a bonus of

being ill. “If you say to a waiter in a

restaurant, ‘Can you help me out of

my chair? I’ve got Parkinson’s and I

find it difficult,’ they say, ‘Certainly, sir.’

Soon enough his mate will come

running across and they’ll take a side

each and get you up out of your chair

and on your feet.” (Which was more

than he did for his victim in Swindon.)

“You find something glorious about

people. They love helping you.”

And of course, I say, no one has

helped him more than Pamela

Stephenson, the New Zealand-born

comedian turned shrink he married

in 1989 after his first marriage

drowned in a lake of alcohol, not all

of it consumed by him. (He credits

Stephenson as the reason he stopped

drinking, after she named his sozzled,

pugnacious alter ego “Bogey Man”.)

“She was the first one to help me

out of a chair. She’s as strong as an

ox. She got me up. It was no problem

to her. When I peed the bed I was

embarrassed. Dear God, I peed the

bed! I’m an adult! I peed the f***ing

bed! She cleaned it up, cleaned me up,

and we started again.”

Most people don’t speak of this stuff,

I caution. “Well it’s time they did.

It’s good to talk and let other people

find that they’re not in as bad a

position as they thought they were.

There’s nothing shameful about it.”

Connolly has always gone further

than his audiences thought they

wanted to go. The first Connolly joke

most remember is the one he told on

Michael Parkinson’s chat show in 1975.

It was about a man who killed his wife

and buried her in the garden. I won’t

spoil the punchline, but it involved her

corpse’s bottom. The joke made him

a star. Today people might say that it

was about violence against women and

accuse him of misogyny. “And they

would probably be right. The whole

world had changed,” he says.

Was he a bit misogynistic? “Without

question. I used to do gay stuff. I

would be publicly hanged for it today.”

He has a chapter in his new

I learnt in the

shipyards that

you can be funny

and profound