■ Sir Billy Connolly

is not worried about antagonising his fellow Scots. The comedian says of his colleagues when he worked at a Glasgow shipyard: ‘They didn’t like being welders, and they didn’t like where they lived, and they didn’t like their wives. i never understood it. There was a lack of optimism, of worry about the future.’ if he was younger, he would move Down Under, saying: ‘The treasure it has is its optimism.’