A peeling: "Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet"

Here's a digital-era resurrection of an artefact that, upon its first release in the late 1970s, likely slipped out as the lower half of a double feature: a 70-minute snapshot of the up-and-coming Glaswegian comic Billy Connolly, caught just after his early breakthrough appearances on TV's Parkinson, as he begins to pivot away from the musical cabaret that launched him, towards full, arena-pleasing, career-defining stand-up. Every performer (and their management) wanted one of these post-Don't Look Back: a chance to explain, over feature length, who they were, what they do, and why an audience might enjoy following their progress. Yet where Connolly's American contemporaries Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor decided their routines would be best showcased in conventional concert-movie format, Big Banana Feet - an access-all-areas record of the Irish leg of its subject's 1975 tour, named after the mocked-up Fyffes Connolly wore on stage every night - operates very much in the Pennebaker mode. We spend as much time backstage and offstage as on it, time enough to notice a distinct lack of glamour. For starters, Connolly still has to carry his own bags, and there are endless rounds of introductions to and negotiations with local functionaries. There is a lot of smoking, and consequently a lot of rheumy coughing that threatens to obscure the dialogue in built-up areas. (In true fly-on-the-wall fashion, the sound appears to have been the last element anybody attended to - though the BFI's admirable restoration has taken steps to correct this.) You can't even get a good night's kip, because there's a camera crew poking their heads around the hotel-room door, and early morning radio slots to be filled. Dylan was already a global megastar at the time of Don't Look Back, so maybe the latter isn't quite the right reference point; Big Banana Feet would make a pungent double-bill with 1979's Arrows, an odd but evocative short (recently revived on BBC Four) following the young Eric Bristow around the UK exhibition circuit at around the same moment. If Connolly himself weren't so garrulous and curious - if he wasn't so clearly enjoying being out and about in the world - we might start to note ennui, exhaustion, even despair setting in.

From the comedian's interactions with press - an essential part of the post-Pennebaker showbiz doc - we intuit that Connolly wasn't quite yet the national treasure he would become, but instead regarded, perhaps unnecessarily warily, as a live wire or diamond in the rough, a definition of a cult turn. With alternative comedy still some years away from going mainstream, Connolly has to explain himself at every turn: his language, his fondness for (schoolboy) vulgarity, his political and footballing allegiances. It's noticeable, from the clips we get of the live show, that this act at this time featured a higher-than-typical percentage of snot, fart and knob gags; in his younger guise, Connolly was giving an audience what they wanted, rather than taking a line for a comic walk, as he later would, thereby giving us what we weren't expecting. Even so, there are flashes of a razor-sharp mind, as with his response to a heckler's shout of "Up the IRA" - a reminder of the sorry world beyond the concert hall - and his backstage justification for not doing explicitly political material. Late on, during a performance in Belfast, Connolly broaches the then-contentious subject of the critic Kenneth Tynan using the F-word on live TV, and you can see him beginning to work up a routine with a clearly defined start, middle and end, to think about jokes as more than bits of business with which to break up the songs. (Though, of course, he also has a song about it, too.) The directors Murray Grigor and Paddy Higson offer us more of this gig than any other, possibly because Connolly appears to talk more than he sings: with the benefit of comedy hindsight, we sense he wants to step out from behind the guitar and banjo he has wielded (far from unskilfully) as crutches, to use his hands, as wavily expressive as that wild mane of hair, to reinforce a punchline, to play the audience as he once did his instruments. Only his shaggy likability remained a constant, offstage as on. From Don't Look Back, you retain the memory of miseryguts Dylan sulking behind shades; Big Banana Feet's lasting image, by contrast, is of Connolly chuckling away with his fellow acts, airport security, the tea ladies in the club. His folk music days were almost behind him, but a new folk hero was about to emerge.

Billy Connolly: Big Banana Feet is now showing in selected cinemas, streaming via Prime Video, and available on DVD via the BFI.