‘I’d like to die by Loch Lomond where I played as a child’ says Sir Billy Connolly
Comedian reminisces from home in Florida
WISH “I don’t like to look like a bagpiper with heather in my ears but sometimes your love for the place just has to find a stage.”
SIR BILLY CONNOLLY
Sir Billy Connolly has said he would like to die in his native Scotland by the shores of Loch Lomond.
The comedian, who moved from New York to Florida two years ago, said he longed to return to the Scottish loch where he played as a child during his time in the Cub Scouts.
In footage from his new programme, Billy Connolly’s Ultimate World Tour, the actor and presenter reminisces over his childhood from his Florida home.
He says: “I remember standing by the shores of Loch Lomond, Inversnaid, and the sky was beautiful. I remember that line, I forget whose line it is: ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my native land.’
“I don’t like to look like a bagpiper with heather in my ears but sometimes your love for the place just has to find a stage. I’d like to die there.
“It’s a weird subject to bring up, but I’m 75. I wouldn’t like to stay away forever. I’d like to be planted there eventually, in Loch Lomond.”
In 2013, the comedian revealed he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and prostate cancer on the same day. He has since been given the all clear for cancer and moved to Florida to fight the degenerative disorder.
ITV’S Ultimate World Tour will see Sir Billy, now 76, travel his newly adopted home state while looking back at his travels from the last 25 years, from Scotland to Canada and Australia.
About the series, he said: “It was exactly 25 years ago that I found myself taking the cameras out of the theatres and into the world.
“It’s a journey that’s taken me to far flung places and offered up once-in-a-lifetime experiences and I’m still discovering thrilling new stuff around every corner now I’ve pitched up in Florida.”
Earlier this week Sir Billy hit back at former chat show host, Sir Michael Parkinson, who claimed the comedian didn’t know who he was.
In August, Sir Michael recounted an “awkward dinof ner” he had shared with the comic in which he said Sir Billy “no longer recognises close friends”.
“I saw him recently – he’s now living in America – and it was very sad because I was presenting him with a prize at an awards ceremony,” Sir Michael recounted on Saturday Morning with James Martin. “We had an awkward dinner together because I wasn’t quite sure if he knew who I was or not.”
Sir Billy, speaking in Glasgow earlier this week, rebuffed the accusations about the state of his health. When asked what he thought of Parkinson’s observations, the comic told a reporter: “I don’t know. You’d better ask him.” Sir Billy added: “It was two years since I’d seen him and that occasion was the GQ dinner and I did really well, so what he was talking about I’ll never know. “
He’s been selling funerals [funeral plans] too long.” Sir Billy continued: “But the thing that got me about it was what if it was true? It’s still a shi**y thing to do. What do you think Billy Connolly? ‘Oh, he’s f***ed’.”
When asked if he had spoken to Sir Michael since the event, Connolly said: “No. I don’t speak to him normally anyway.”
Sir Billy is shown dancing naked three times during the latest ITV documentary; once in the Arctic circle in 1995, between ancient standing stones in Orkney in 1994 and the Pinnacles in Australia two years later.