It's far from tickety boo

Let's start with the established fact that Billy Connolly was born and bred in Partick, Glasgow. He was educated in the ways of crowd-

pleasing comic performance in the Clydeside shipyard where he spent his early adulthood as an apprentice welder. Additionally, Billy's comedy has drawn upon such native Celtic characters as The Jobbie-Wheecher and three men fae Carntyne (and a bottle of wine, and five Woodbine, and a big black greyhound dug named Boab). Likewise, in the pithy Glaswegian patois with which he has so memorably framed so many everyday truths these past 30 years, Billy Connolly is The Big Yin, not The Tall Chap.

Having latterly bought a mansion house in rural Aberdeenshire, Billy Connolly is now the Laird of Candacraig. Fulfilling the traditional terms of this Caledonian role, Billy happily wore full Highland fig as he dispensed drams to the 100 pike-bearing Men of Lonach as they marched through the glen wherein they were born to last summer's Lonach Highland Gathering in Bellabeg Park.

OK, OK, cut the keech: I think we're all agreed that Billy Connolly is Scottish. Moreover, we must laud him for having been one of the founding fathers of the prevailing school of stand-up comedy - honest, observational, confessional, creative - which has universally banished yesteryear's cruel and facile gagsmiths. He might no longer be a

US TV regular, yet Billy is nevertheless our most genuinely successful global comedy export.

So why in Golspie's name is Billy Connolly wholly absent from the series that seeks to provide a Scottish people's history of Scottish comedy, Hoots (BBC1)? Billy wasn't in this week's fifth episode, nor will he be in next week's concluding one.

A terse BBC Scotland official statement says simply: ''Mr Connolly was contacted regarding the use of footage from his stand-up routine within the Hoots series. However, he declined.''

Casting no light whatsoever, Billy's managerial handlers at the Tickety Boo agency in London yesterday said that they didn't wish to speak to the press about a decision by one of Scotland's all-time top comics not to appear in a series about Scotland's all-time top comics. What can one thus surmise?

Billy surely can't have had qualms about the professional competence of Hoots's makers, Glasgow-based Wark Clements, one of Britain's most successful, best-respected, independent production companies.

Is there any other evidence of Billy's reluctance to take part in comedy history shows? No. He took part in a recent Omnibus profile of stand-up innovator and Hollywood star Steve Martin, commending Martin as ''an LA comedian''.

Jings, Billy, if Steve Martin's world-conquering LA brand of comedy is worthy of praise, then so is your world-conquering Scottish brand of comedy. For, over the past few weeks Hoots has succeeded in establishing a non-parochial definition of Scottish comedy and the Scottish sense of humour.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, Hoots's host, Fred MacAulay, met Partick Thistle's board of directors, a funny bunch of stoics who demonstrated that Scottish humour is rooted in unending tragedy and a healthily democratic impulse to self-mockery. If we can characterise Jewish humour, say, as pessimistic yet affirmatory, Scots' humour is irreverent, bawdy, and forceful.

Not that this week's edition of Hoots was very good, it must be said. Crivvens, no. For one thing, it sought the opinion of two groups of Scots who apparently came over all tongue-tied whenever the cameras rolled. One smug bunch of Edinburgh patricians engaged in sterile and uncomprehending

banter about Rab C Nesbitt over dinner-party canapes. At the other class extreme, some Kvaerner Govan shipyard workers capered like performing monkeys.

And Stanley Baxter's allegedly classic TV shows? Overly-

choreographed; overblown; spookily hermaphroditic, and not very funny. More recently, we've come up with the goods, though. Gregor Fisher's pie-stained leer; the educated

middle-class anarchy of the Absolutely gang; the whimsical couth of Scotland The What?; Chewin' The Fat's willingness to take a Stanley knife to Scottish comedy's kite and carve surreal gang slogans on it.

Perhaps Billy Connolly simply reckons he can't cut it against new boys Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill. Do let us know, Billy.

A hellish grim Londonocentric sense of humour pervades The Peter Principle (BBC1), a smuttily awful new sitcom set in a bank wherein it's like punk never happened and Are You Being Served never ended. Everyone in The Peter Principle misunderstands everyone else, about everything, all the time, and anyone could be a) a post-operative Brazilian trans-sexual; b) a postman strippogram, or c) both.

Cop this svelte bit of naturalistic dialogue from the bank's love-lorn male area manager to the object of his affections, a female assistant manager: ''I can't wait to have you under me . . . no, ooh-er, I only mean, um . . .'' Speaking personally, I can't wait to have The Peter Principle behind me . . . no, ooh-er, um, I only mean it's a complete pile of ordure.

Which brings me to the most malodorous heap of TV waste-product I've ever seen, Geri's World Walkabout (BBC1). This glossy ad for Geri Halliwell Pop Pap plc featured the self-regarding former Spice Girl flouncing vacuously around some of the world's more poverty-stricken communities as a UN Goodwill Ambassador, attempting to look aghast and caring, and cuddling any unlucky orphan too lame to evade her grasp.

Brainless? Sick-making? I declare, when two-watt lightbulb Geri started to look photogenically horrified for the camera on the site of the Nazis' Sachsenhausen concentration camp, I felt my own Hitler-style putsch a-comin' on.

So, I beseech, you, Mr Connolly, never invite Geri Halliwell northwards to Candacraig House, there to add her name to your visitors' book alongside those of Steve Martin, Eric Idle, and Robin Williams, your celebrity guests at last year's Lonach Highland Gathering.

But if you do, Mr C, I shall call upon the Men of Lonach to fix their pikes and advance angrily upon your person. In addition, I'll be there with three men fae Carntyne (and a bottle of wine, and five Woodbine, and a big black greyhound dug named Boab). You and Geri'll be dodging wheeched

jobbies for ages, I promise, pal.