Windswept and Interesting by Billy Connolly review: the Big Yin's story – as told to his iPhone

Billy Connolly claims this is his first attempt at memoir, but much of it is already familiar from his stage shows, or from the excellent biography his wife, Pamela Stephenson, published in 2002. We know that he was born in a Glasgow tenement in 1942, abandoned by his mother when he was four, and brought up by his father, who sexually abused him.

He was useless at school and only really found happiness when he went to work in the Clyde shipyards, as an apprentice and then as a welder. He loved his fellow workers, especially the “patter merchants”, who had a way of being funny without actually telling jokes. It was a great day when he found he could make them laugh.

At the same time, he learnt to play the banjo and started going to folk gigs. He was in a duo, the Humblebums, which got plenty of bookings on the folk circuit, but then he went solo. Increasingly, he relied on talking rather than singing, because he loved making audiences laugh. He always took his banjo on stage (“It was my pal”), but seldom played it. His mother turned up at one of his shows – he had only seen her once since infancy – and took him back to her house and introduced him to her husband and children, but it felt weird. “I had just buried 20 years of longing and suffering and pretended to be a guest in her house.”

He married his girlfriend, Iris, when she became pregnant with their first child, in l968. But his career was taking off and he spent more and more time away touring, and also drinking: “I didn’t know how to be a good family man.”

On the rare occasions when he did come home, he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t ring for room service or why he should have to take out the rubbish. By then, he was a big star and relied on his manager for everything. He once rang his manager saying he was locked in a phone box but didn’t know where it was – his manager dutifully trawled the streets until he found him.