The beastie, Gabriel and me

Trying to describe himself, Billy Connolly says: "There was a teacher at school who called me a jellyfish.

'You're spineless, Connolly! You're a jellyfish!' I was really wounded by that. But I was going for a walk along the coast recently and I saw these two jellyfish. They were sensational-looking things! They were the coolest animal on earth. I thought, 'God almighty, I am a jellyfish!''' Connolly is a mixture of things - he's a man with deep psychological wounds, but he has a towering presence. He is chunky. "I could lose a wee bit," he says. Having dyed his unruly hair blond, he looks windswept, heroic. The beard is bushy, but sharply defined. He is slightly manic.

Unlike regular people, he believes, he is unable to control the flow of his thoughts. "I used to think I was stupid," he says, "but I don't any more. Because I've since found that there's something wrong with me. I have this attention deficit thing. When I go back to America I'm getting electronic treatment for it. I have an inability to focus. Sometimes it's so intense that I want to sleep."

He's currently living in Hollywood with his second wife, a psychotherapist known as "Dr Connolly", who is also the former comedienne Pamela Stephenson. She does not treat Billy, but he has spent time in therapy, and has come to believe that his condition, attention deficit disorder, is the key to his comedy. Instead of writing his material down, and then performing it, he just rushes on stage and hopes funny things will come out of him. Often, they do.

"People say it's awful clever the way I'll leave a story in the middle and come back to it later," he says. "No, it's not. I leave the story because I can't f***ing remember it! I'll have had another thought, and this thought will spoil the story I'm on. So I have to talk about the thought until it's finished. That's the way my brain works. And that's what stopped me passing exams at school." For Connolly, school was a nightmare. He says: "See, I would understand the French teacher perfectly. I understood the maths! I understood geometry! But I couldn't f***ing do it when I got home, when I was on my own. It wouldn't work! I knew it, but I couldn't access it. My whole life was like that. It's my whole life."

In performance, though, things are different: "I'm allowed to be like this. And I'm very good at it." Standing on a stage is, he says, "where I live". Referring to his technique, he says, "I don't really know what it is. And, as I get older, I don't think I care to know what it is. And when I've seen anybody try to analyse it they bore me shitless."

Now that Pamela Stephenson has published Billy, a blushingly intimate biography of her husband, you must know something about the deprivations, and degradations, of his childhood.

He was born during the war. His mother ran away with a sailor when he was two. His father and his two aunts, who brought him up, were awful, to say the least. "I tried to get on well with my father," he says. "It didn't really work. I liked him. He was a nice man, but we had a little rumble when I was very, very young. It was a sexual thing, me and my Da. He abused me, my father. And I always wanted him to like me. He never did." As if this wasn't bad enough, "Even when I was in comedy, he never liked me. He thought I was too weird."

Later, he experimented with homosexuality, became a banjo player, married, had children, divorced, snorted coke, had a drug-induced seizure and became an actor (his latest role is as the Angel Gabriel, with painted toenails, in the film Gabriel and Me).

As you must know, he waged a dramatic war with the bottle. "I think it has many faces, alcoholism," he says. "And I am one of the faces. They call people like me a functioning drunk. It was taking up my whole damn life." Describing his years of alcoholism, he says: "I was in pubs getting sozzled and being funny, and talking to people for hours and hours on end about football teams that are long forgotten, and finding myself in towns and houses, and I didn't know where I was when I woke up."