Sir Billy Connolly said being beaten at school by his teachers helped inspire his career in comedy.

The entertainment legend said he dealt with being regularly belted at his primary school in Glasgow by trying to see it as a comical situation.

And Sir Billy, 77, revealed his experiences of school and confrontations between “the big boss and the wee man” inspired much of his material.

He talks about his childhood in Glasgow at the start of a new six-part BBC Television series celebrating his success, called Billy and Us.

The first episode will be broadcast on Thursday.

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Speaking in the first episodes of the series, which focuses on his childhood, Connolly admits that there was “plenty of harshness and darkness in it”.

But he insists he was “delirious” when he was away from school and allowed the freedom to play with his friends in the courtyard behind the tenement flat he grew up in.

Sir Billy said: “It was post-war.

“Beating your children up was pretty normal. People were beaten for the slightest things.

“All of it was a comedy to me.

“I seemed to spend my time standing apart from it and looking at it. It’s easy to deal with it that way.

“It wasn’t pleasant the way it is now.

“My experience of school stayed with me and stays with me to this day.

“It was traumatic.

“It lent itself to comedy – the big boss and the wee man.”

Sir Billy, who was famously named The Big Yin by his family after he began to outgrow his father, also revealed he was terrified of being stuck with his childhood nickname “Cuddles”

He said: "I had the worst nickname in the world at school - Cuddles.

“It lasted about a year and it mercifully went away.

“Somebody had a printed up thing at school, Cupid's Cuddling Circle, which said it was a certificate which entitles you to a cuddle.

“It was being passed around the class and someone passed it to me when the teacher went: 'What's that Connolly? Bring that out here.'

“I took it out and when he read it he went: 'Okay Cuddles, sit down.'

“After about a year it faded away, but I was terrified it would last."

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The documentary recalls how Sir Billy disclosed in 2002 he had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of his father when he was a child.

He said: “Good comedians tend to have a dark past.

“That doesn’t mean you have to have something sinful or weird or criminal about your past.

“My background was the inability to be educated.

“It made me think differently from everybody else. I’m grateful for it.

“I don’t think I missed anything.”

Discussing how much of his stage show was inspired by his upbringing, Connolly added: "There is little truth in it, little bits of truth, exaggerated out of all proportion.

“You have to exaggerate it to make it acceptable to people, to get them to recognise that I'm talking about them as well as me.

"There was plenty of harshness and darkness in it, but plenty of joy