an opera cape and cigarette holder next!’ he says.
I watch Billy, surrounded by people who can’t believe their luck to be standing next to the man. Fortunately, many of them are also art lovers, eager to take home a slice of Billyness to hang in their living rooms. There’s a queue for his stunning drawings and prints, for which he has devised titles such as Extinct Scottish Amphibian, Pantomime Giraffe, Celtic Bling, Chookie Birdie, and A Load of Old Bollocks. He has been working on these for several years now, hunched over his drawing pad for many hours at a time. I especially love the darker, almost sinister ones, such as The Staff, which is a row of similar, expressionless people in gas masks, all facing the same way. Told you it was dark. But as Robert Stoller said, ‘Kitsch is the corpse that’s left when art has lost its anger.’ Throughout the afternoon, Billy tells me, a pointed question has been posed time and time again: ‘What does your psychologist wife think of your drawings?’ ‘Oh,’ replied Billy, ‘she just peers at them then walks away with a superior, shrinky look on her face.’ Rubbish. I take photos of this triumph and text them to our kids. ‘Your father is officially an artist!’ I crow, as if I had anything to do with it. Well, I probably did – especially those pieces that were born of fury or frustration.
Is it ever easy to be with the same person for more than thirty years? Sometimes I think I was not the right wife for Billy. I’m too self-determining, career-oriented, eager for adventure, and busy. Billy might even add ‘bossy’. ‘If you hadn’t been married to me,’ I asked him recently, ‘whom would you have wanted to be your wife instead?’ ‘Sandra Bullock,’ he replied, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I think she’s lovely. There’s a wee promise in her face. Or maybe Sinéad Cusack, ’cause she’s fanciable, too. And that blonde woman on CSI Miami who looks like you Pamela. Well, she’s OK …’ Billy must have caught my horrified micro-expression, ‘… but she’s not as nice as you …’ Good to know.
Billy was wonderfully supportive when, against his advice, I took part in the BBC television show Strictly Come Dancing. He giggled uncontrollably at my first waltz, but was later caught looking misty-eyed when my dance partner James Jordan performed a routine that helped catapult us to the finals. I wondered if – even slightly hoped – Billy would be jealous of James, but my husband was far too self-assured for that. But he warned me: ‘I wouldn’t trust a man who wore such tight trousers.’ Billy now complains he’s a ‘tango widow’ because I take off after dinner to dance until midnight. ‘Why don’t you come along?’ I frequently ask. Billy has had one tango lesson, and there are black-and-white shoes in his wardrobe, so he is partly equipped for a milonga. ‘Think I’ll give it a miss,’ he says. ‘Watching snake-hipped foreigners molesting you on the dance floor has limited appeal.’
Would Billy have preferred a cosy, soup-maker type of wife? From time to time I’m quite sure he would, but that’s not me. Anyway, he’d hate to have a mate who intruded too much on his daily life. Yes, Billy has become more and more of a hermit. Sometimes I think he’s a budding Howard Hughes. If I visit him in a foreign city where he’s been working for a while I am usually appalled by the state of his hotel room; he just hates letting people in to tidy up. I dare not touch his stuff – his drawing materials carefully laid out, his crossword puzzle beside the bed awaiting inspiration about thirty-two down, his brightly coloured underpants hanging in the shower, his banjo leaning precariously against the bathroom door. I swear he’d let his fingernails and beard grow to disgusting lengths if the various make-up artists he works with did not intervene for professional reasons. He might as well buy some planes, design a bra, and be done with it.
At least Billy and I don’t have a relationship like that of a friend’s grandfather who, when asked how many sugars he liked in his tea, replied irritably: ‘Och, I don’t know. Ask your granny.’ No, we spend too much time apart to become that enmeshed. But despite the travelling both our jobs require, we stay very much in touch. Yesterday afternoon, sitting in New York, I phoned Billy in Manchester. ‘I had the concert of my life tonight,’ he crowed. ‘What exactly made it so?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I just walked on, strode downstage, faced them, and just went for it.’ No one can analyse what Billy does, least of all him. Turned out the crowd at the Manchester Apollo had been treated to a favourite story of mine, about the time he went with a couple of mates to visit a friend in Glasgow. This no-frills bachelor cooked them breakfast, but there were no plates or eating utensils so he proffered food on a spatula. When one of them reacted uncomfortably to being expected to take a hot, dripping egg in his bare hand, he rebuked him with ‘Oh, don’t be so fucking bourgeois!’ Well, that’s the bare bones of the story, but Billy tells it in his idiosyncratic picturepainting style that brings the house down. ‘They loved it,’ he glowed. ‘Of course they did,’ I replied admiringly. ‘And how many times in your life have you felt you’d had the concert of your life?’ ‘About a dozen times,’ he replied. ‘Where?’ I asked, knowing full well I’d never get an exact answer. ‘Don’t know. It’s very difficult to tell. Tonight I was just in great shape with a great audience. Changing my mind. I suddenly thought to tell them about when you’re vomiting having had a curry, you find you’re an expert in African folk music. Then I did a thing about a drunk guy singing. He’s been thrown out of the pub and he’s standing on the street practising ordering drinks. But he gets fed up so he sings a song. Then I sang a new country song I wrote called “I’d Love to Kick the Shit Out of You”.’ See, it doesn’t sound funny when you put it like that, does it? Even Billy himself finds that a problem. He never writes down ‘material’ like most other comedians, but just before a show he tries to think of a list of things he might talk about. This only makes him more scared. ‘I think, “Fuck, I’ve got nothing!”’ he says.
Billy continues to be as nervous and anxious about going on stage as he was when I first met him. But, as he counselled me years ago when I was doing something similar, ‘You need your nerves.’ Once he gets on stage it’s a different story. He is still at his happiest under the spotlight. I still marvel every time I see him perform, watching the delicacy and ease with which he struts the stage. It’s truly magnificent. He would hit you if you used the word ‘technique’ to describe his comedy style, but the fact is he has one, and it’s genius.
Billy’s approach has altered little over the years, but there are some minor differences. Nowadays, he feels rather less tolerant of hecklers than he was when he first started. I believe this reflects the fact that he has matured as a performer to the point where he understands how annoying interruptions of any kind can be for other audience members – especially when they emanate from someone whose had a few too many. I remember when people used to stroll in and out of his show, to buy drinks or take a toilet break any time they felt like it, and it was enormously distracting for both Billy and audience alike. Fortunately, Billy has seen fit to slightly shorten the length of time he stands on stage – it used to be a marathon three and a half hours, so I suppose people needed to move around a bit. But even today, occasionally someone will start to shout incoherently. ‘Pick a window,’ Billy would say. ‘You’re leaving.’ Other deterrents included: ‘Keep talking so the bouncer can find you!’ or even ‘Does your mouth bleed every twenty-eight days?’ But backstage, Billy’s attitude is usually surprisingly benign. ‘Och,’ he shrugs. ‘They’ve heard CDs of my old shows. They think I like it.’
Over the years Billy’s performing style has become refined to the point where you think he’s simply talking to you in your living room, over a cup of tea, and making you howl. It’s effortless, seamless. He paints magical mind-pictures that force every last bit of air from your lungs leaving you gasping and sore of stomach. No one else in the world can do that. I’ve been watching him for thirty-odd years and I’m still a fan.
Billy says the best thing about being nearly seventy is not thinking about it. ‘But there’s something good about it when you’re upright,’ he confessed, ‘and when you look like me rather than one of those guys who’ve gone for the saggyarsed trousers.’ An anti-beige campaigner for many years now, Billy is proud of not looking like his father’s idea of an old man. ‘It’s nice to have hair,’ he boasts. ‘I’ve been very lucky with my genetics.’ One of Billy’s life ambitions was never to act his age. ‘Acting your age is as sensible as acting your street number,’ he says. ‘Acting the goat is much