Invading the Big Yin's space

I am going to have to be very careful what I say about this book, because Billy Connolly and, by extension, his muse and biographer Pamela Stephenson, have attained some kind of secular divinity.

The reason for this is Stephenson's previous essay on her husband, Billy, which told the story of how he overcame the demons in his life and achieved personal and professional equilibrium. The story touched many and, as a self-help through sympathetic identification manual, it has doubtless been a force for good in a wicked world.

Unfortunately, having trawled through its pages with the finest of micromesh nets, I cannot say the same for this book. It is essentially the record of one year in the life of the Connolly family, the year in which Billy prepares himself for the cataclysmic event of his 60th birthday.

There is much talk of this occasion throughout, and here is a sample, in which Pamsy - oh, yes, she is known as Pamsy to her nearest and dearest - attempts to calm his disquiet about getting old by mangling the language: "But even my suggestion that instead of Sexagesimus we rename it his Sexageniality did not assuage his ambivalence about the prospect."

In a sense, Connolly is a lucky man to have such a fan acting as a Boswell to his Johnson. Pamsy truly believes her husband to be the sexiest and wisest man on the planet. But his sexual supremacy and his wisdom, powerful attractions as they undoubtedly are, pale into insignificance when set alongside that towering sense of humour.

Pamsy believes that every word that comes out of Billy's gob, adorned as it is with purple facial hair, is, literally, hysterical. She crawls around the carpet, tears of mirth cascading down her cheeks every time he so much as breaks wind. An actual joke makes her ribcage look like the wreck of the Mary Rose.

As if this weren't enough to gag on, there is the unpalatable fact that Pamsy is a psychologist of the Californian school. Thus, when Billy retires early from Pamsy's Australia Day "Beauty and Terror" dinner party to tinkle on his banjo, Pamsy seeks him out.

"Help me to understand why you're sitting out here," she says, explaining to the reader that questions beginning with the word "why" are confrontational. This is not the only space of Billy's she invades: whole sections of the book are taken up with her imagining his Glasgow childhood, right down to episodes when "his heart began to beat a little faster". Spooky!

And how did the birthday party go? I hear you ask. Go on, have a guess.