Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [19]
I wish we had an El in Glasgow. We almost did once. In the 1930s a guy called George Bennie built a prototype rail system called the ‘railplane’ at Milngavie, just outside the city. It was on legs and rails, just like the El, but the cars hung from an overhead monorail and had propellers powered by on-board motors at each end of the carriage. They looked like cigar tubes. Bennie reckoned his trains could travel at up to 120 m.p.h., but he couldn’t find someone to finance his great idea and build it in Glasgow. That was a shame, because we Glaswegians could have had something like the El, but even more swanky. Sydney’s got something similar now – the overhead railway – and it’s hugely popular. It makes the traffic flow better and people like it because they can get to work easily. It’s comfortable, it’s funky and it looks great.
Because I like the El so much, I’d persuaded the director that we ought to film something about it before we set off on Route 66. But when we went to do it I was a wee bit disillusioned because the director took us far down the line, where the El runs along rails at ground level, not suspended above the street. What I didn’t realise was that it’s difficult to get permission to film on the inner-city section that I like. But then the director told me he had a wee trick in mind. We boarded a train a long way out of town and I interviewed a supervisor called Jackie, who is some kind of expert on the system and its history. While I asked her all about her job and the El, the train started to rise above the streets, and before I knew it we were back in the centre of Chicago. I got off the train and walked down the stairs, with the crew filming me all the way. Result.
It made me very happy, not because we’d found a cunning way to bypass the restrictions, but because I like to celebrate the achievements of the human race. I like to show people at their best. And I think you often see people at their absolute best in engineering. Of course, the El is a staggering feat of engineering, especially the riveting. There must be a zillion rivets in Chicago, and most of them are on the El. Whenever I see something like the El, or a big ship or an impressive bridge, I get so proud of my species. Which makes a change. It’s our fault that the jungle is on fire, although I never set fire to a jungle in my life. It’s our fault that the spotted lemur has got nowhere to live, even though I couldn’t pick out a spotted lemur in a police line-up. I’m a nice guy. I want the world to be beautiful. So I like to point out the beauty of human creations, like the El, to give the human race a nudge, as if to say, ‘Just look what we can achieve if we put our minds to it.’
Thinking about celebrating the beauty of mankind’s creativity got me thinking about another of my pet theories, which is that newspaper obituaries should be closer to the front because they are often stories about the great unsung heroes of the world. I realised this when a pal of mine died some years ago. I read his obituary; then I read all the others in the paper that day. And I thought: My God, these are extraordinary people. How come I’ve never heard of them? They had found cures for diseases or helped children and innocent people escape from dictators all over the world. But we rarely took any notice of them because they were old. If we saw them in a supermarket, we’d never give them a second thought.
So I’m on a little one-man crusade to bring the obituary closer to the front of the paper. Let’s sing a bit louder about the unsung. Rather than spending