The Big Yin's not laughing any more But it's a different Billy now. One that flirts with Los Angeles, floats around the Mediterranean on a yacht, and keeps a turreted pile in the best part of the Grampians. In the 40 years he's been working, he has made millions, and we surely shouldn't begrudge him his comforts, yet he remains touchy, in a peculiarly Caledonian way, to the charge of arrivisme. "As soon as I got successful, the Scottish press started picking on me," he has said. It's something they reserve just for me. It isn't only the lifestyle that has become grander. As he has grown older, his shows have grown longer - too long and too disfigured by digression, say some critics - and when any performer laughs this much at his own jokes, audiences may begin to question how funny they really are. Last week, viewers of a TV channel voted Connolly the most influential British stand-up comedian of all time - but it wasn't on the strength of walking off stage. At least his wife thinks he's great. And then some. Billy met comedienne-turned-psychoanalyst Pamela Stephenson 30 years ago when he made a cameo appearance on her BBC show Not the Nine O'Clock News, and she has since written two adoring biographies of him. "My husband," she reveals in Bravemouth, the second, "is an alpha-enigma; a man blessed with comedic peerlessness, literary panache, musical giftedness and acting brilliance who remains a warm, loving and delightful human being." You have to go a little deeper to discover that their marriage isn't entirely without problems. Pamela admits to finding Billy difficult and irritating, and says that they have "ding-dong rows... about things like the class system," but the real difficulty is understanding what goes on in his head. His dreams, she says, are so disturbed and violent that she has to build a "Berlin Wall of pillows" around herself when they turn in for the night. It may not be quite as scary as it sounds, though. Billy turns out to be virtually nocturnal, spending the wee hours strumming his banjo while gazing out of the window, wishing he was somewhere else. His former road manager has described him as "the most gregarious man I have ever met, yet he has barely a friend in the world." It is heartening to think that the lesson in all this is that even a start in life as grim and damaging as Connolly's need be no obstacle to success. He was born on the kitchen floor of a Glasgow tenement on November 24, 1942. His mother, Mamie, walked out when he was three, leaving him to be raised by two aunts and his father, William, an RAF technician, who, Billy claimed later, beat and sexually abused him. At 15, he left school and found a job as an apprentice welder in a Clyde shipyard. Banter and songs relieved, to the extent that anything could, the hardships of the job, and although Connolly has been generous in acknowledging the debt he owes to his old workmates, there are still plenty who claim the copyright to his best jokes. He taught himself to play the banjo, and after eight years in the yards left to try his luck on the folk-club circuit. The jokes started as a way of filling the gaps between his limited repertoire of songs, but as the years went by and the audiences became ever more appreciative of his patter, he turned into a comedian. Then into a star. And finally, in late middle-age into... what exactly? The Billy of old would have learnt from his audiences rather than walking out on them. Restlessness, heckling and forays to the bar suggest a demand for something fresher and shorter. Forty years should be a good career in comedy, not the duration of a show.