Singing 'I'm No a Billy, he's a Tim'

Written by Caroline Whitham | 14 August 2011

To anyone unfamiliar with the sporting culture of Glasgow, or its patter for that matter, I can imagine that Singing 'I'm No a Billy, He's a Tim'’ might not have a great deal of impact. Having grown up on the Southside of Glasgow myself, the play is the perfect explanation as to why I will always harbour a fierce hatred of football, thanks to exactly the kind of casual sectarian idiocy on display here.

The sad truth about sectarianism is that 95% of the time it’s not violent clashes outside Rangers v Celtic matches or bombs being sent to Neil Lennon’s lawyer. It’s everyday people who blindly subscribe to a number of ethnic stereotypes such as “Catholics don’t wash” or “Protestants are all Masons”, who chant threatening songs at one another without thinking about the words (for example “We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood,” a particularly charming lyric from Billy Boys, a Rangers chant, which is quoted during the play), and who casually discriminate against their opposite number, be they Protestant or Catholic, without ever questioning why.

This is where Singing 'I'm No a Billy, He's a Tim’ is so successful, in depicting the banality of sectarianism. The eponymous Billy and Tim (also derogatory nicknames for Protestants and Catholics, respectively) are locked in a cell together on a big match day, and have to negotiate both their ingrained bigotry and with the on-duty policeman to let them watch the match on his TV. Both are banged up for petty crimes rather than for hurling bricks, but each is still convinced that the other is scum thanks to the football jersey they’re wearing and the way they practice their religion.

Ultimately Billy and Tim have a lot more in common than they realise, of course. And an excellent counterpoint to their squabbling is provided by the genuinely affecting problems that their guard is facing outside the prison walls. The plot is a little predictable, and it seems unlikely that given an empty prison a guard would lock up a Rangers and a Celtic fan together, but the real issue is whether anyone outside Scotland, or indeed Glasgow, will be able to understand just how deep and murky the background to this rather sweet play actually is, and therefore whether they will really feel its impact.

Singing' I'm No a Billy, he's a Tim, The Stand III, 5-28 Aug (not 15), 12.55pm