SHARP AS EVER
The Big Yin is still fishing for laughs and has us hooked
AS this look back at his travel documentaries showed, Sir Billy Connolly has packed a lot of living into his 76 years. I think this is the first time, however, the comedian has ever left someone with tears in their eyes that were not due to laughter.
Let us, unlike his old mucker Parky, get this straight. Connolly is not dying, or at least no more than any other living being. He has Parkinson’s disease, a condition that in the main affects movement. It is progressive and degenerative, so he is not getting any better unless someone finds a cure. But as he showed in last night’s programme, he is as sharp and funny as a Glasgow slagging.
Nor was this his last appearance on TV. Indeed, the BBC is showing a two-part documentary about his early life and career, Billy Connolly: Made In Scotland, over Christmas. Come January, viewers will be sick of the sight of him. Or maybe not.
Sir Billy’s job last night was to show us round his new stomping ground of Florida. He and wife Pamela Stephenson, who appeared briefly, have built a good life here, one that for him includes a lot of saltwater fly fishing. His fishing partner said Connolly had the right mindset for the hobby. “It’s about being at peace, being relaxed and being loose.” How very un-glaswegian, but it suits him.
Throughout the hour-long show, the Big Yin slipped into what he called “ageing hippy” mode, making pronouncements about love, life and happiness. Perhaps it was this reflective air that gave the film a last hurrah feel. Or it could have been the clips from programmes past, some showing his now infamous nude dances in Orkney, Australia and the Arctic. Despite it being the weather for it in Florida, he did not strip off last night.
The sight of him younger, faster, in his prime, led to inevitably poignant comparisons with today. But he was grand, a little frail, the medication doing its job and a sunny outlook helping with the rest. “There are people only too willing to tell you it is time to give up,” he said. “Time to settle down, Mr Connolly, get a bit beige. Bull **** .”
Besides going fishing, Connolly gave viewers the lowdown on Henry Flagler’s magnificent Florida East Coast Railway; put in a shift with a local crocodile wrangler, aka a “crocodile response agent”; ate bullfrog legs; played a fast and furious game of dominoes; and checked a poet out of the library (a wacky Florida scheme).
Like some big friendly Gandalf in a shirt so loud it required earplugs, he hit it off with people wherever he went. Travel shows you that folk are pretty much the same everywhere, he said.
It is not goodbye from him, but man, it felt like it.
Available on the stv player.
Billy Connolly: Made In Scotland, is on BBC2, December 28 and January 4.