Sing no sad songs for wobbly Connolly

Sir Billy Connolly was contemplating his own mortality, not announcing his imminent demise, in a recent interview which detonated a strong, eulogistic outpouring from readers.

Lots of tributes. You have to wonder whether he’ll find it all touching, or maudlin. Will he mock all that sentiment, or savour it?

Actually, no. You don’t have to wonder. He’ll do both – appreciate, deeply, what’s honest about so much of it, while still instinctively, if not unkindly, puncturing anything that strikes him as silly or overstated.

Time was when audiences were captivated chiefly by his comedic gleefulness and a certain fearlessness of vocabulary. Yet even at his most sweary his demeanour was somehow more exultant than offensive. Gradually, more and more people came to detect profundity behind the profanity.

The bawdy bard of bodily behaviour has, over time, revealed a pretty compelling generosity of spirit towards most human failings. Except perhaps one. Meanspiritedness. He has long assailed it. Found it out. And, even better, modelled alternatives to it.

And now, even as his cultural standing among us is rock solid, his physical standing is increasingly teetering. This man once assailed as a degenerate is now, by his own account, degenerating.

He talks about his life ‘‘slipping away’’, his Parkinson’s disease corroding not only his balance, but also energy, his senses and maybe to some extent memory. Nevertheless, while fully aware of the trajectory, Connolly makes it an act of will to regard what lies ahead as an adventure.

Not without its tribulations, or its fascinations.

It was no bad thing that just before the interview was publicised here, we had a TV screening of his 2014 comedy What We Did on our Holiday, in which he played a grandfather who, having lived wisely and well, was dying.

Spoiler alert (perhaps in more ways than one): his death scene is memorable. While he’s resting on the sand he’s buried to the neck, in time-honoured beach fashion, by his three young grandchildren, only one of whom knew of his prognosis. In this symbolic fresh grave he feigns death but then springs back to life, rising from the sand to scare the wains mightily but also adrenalise them – roaring with laughter as he does so. A short time later, watching them play, he succumbs for real. The children take one of his last observations to heart and, with a bit of practical invention, give him a Viking burntat-sea burial.

Shortly before making this film, Connolly received his twin diagnoses of Parkinson’s and prostate cancer. He told neither the film-makers nor the cast. The resonance of that performance will be a minor, but kind of sweet, part of his legacy. One day.

Meantime, he’s far too perceptive not to know how people feel about him; those closest to him and also the legion who feel he’s been communicating with them unguardedly, as a friend would.

One Connolly story, a true one, about an amputee prompted one of his fan, who for so long had been self-conscious about it, to have a tattooist write around his own stump the defiantly optimistic: ‘‘To be continued . . .’’

Same goes for Connolly’s own story. From here on it will have its sorrows, but its uplifts too. Such is the nature of the condition, and the nature of the man.

This man once assailed as a degenerate is now, by his own account, degenerating.