Billy Connolly: ‘Lots of people are dead but don’t know it yet. They have just given up’

He recently turned 80 and is living with Parkinson’s but Billy Connolly has vowed to continue growing old disgracefully.

The Big Yin says he is disappointed by older people who are no longer excited by life.

“I’ve spent a great deal of my life being a boy, being excited by things, and it has done me good,” he said. “I would always go for the gaudy guitar and the banjo with a picture on the skin. I’ve never recovered from that and I have no intention of doing so.

“I know lots of people who are dead and they don’t know it. They haven’t had a funeral. They’re just dead. They’ve given up. They don’t get excited by anything any more. They dress like the complainer. You become the guy who goes next door and complains about the balls coming in over his hedge into the garden. And it’s a sad thing. I’ve seen it happening to really nice people and it’s a dreadful trap to fall into.”

Connolly says he has accepted he is in the later stages of his life. “Growing old is simply growing old. Getting grey, hair falling out. Mine’s going like hell just now, falling out. I don’t enjoy it but it’s a part of life. It’s the next part,” he said.

It has been 10 years since the comedian announced he had Parkinson’s disease, and he and wife Pamela Stephenson discuss living with the illness in new TV series, Billy Connolly Does…, which starts later this month.

He said: “I don’t mind it actually. I have a lovely life. There are people who are a lot worse than me and I’m doing just dandy. But I’m grateful only the left side shakes. I’ll be in the supermarket and I think, I’m walking good today. Handling the trolley well, picking things up great, and I get to the checkout and they say, ‘Would you like a bit of help to your car?’ I think, oh God, they’ve spotted there’s something wrong with me.”

Stephenson said: “Parkinson’s crept up on us because I saw his hand shaking before he was diagnosed and I think my brain didn’t want to acknowledge it. I thought he’d been playing his banjo too much.

© J Gramston

“The word Parkinson’s strikes fear into people’s hearts and minds because they don’t really understand. People did think right away he was losing it, you know, mentally. And Billy has always had a very selective memory. So it would be quite difficult to evaluate.”

Connolly, who grew up in the Anderston area of Glasgow, also discusses his childhood in the series and describes how schoolteachers piled on the misery he was already dealing with at home, and why his sister Flo was his saviour.

“Miss Gleeson hated me for not doing my homework. ‘Connolly, have you done it? Get out here’ and I was hit with a belt. And she didn’t know my life at home was hell, there were awful things going on,” he said. “I was being preyed upon and my aunt was a nightmare. Coming home from school she’d be there, and I couldn’t sit and do my homework with her roaming about.

“In any case, at six years old I learned a thwack on the hand or even a smack on the mouth is overrated as a pain creator, it’s not the worst thing you’re ever going to feel. My aunties could inflict twice the pain without lifting their hands, by humiliation.

“All the time: ‘Stupid’, ‘You’re thick’, ‘You’re stupid’. To humiliate someone is desperately bad and the wrong thing, it’s worse than hitting somebody. Humiliation is forever. It takes you so long to get over it, it takes your whole life.

“Flo was the hero of my childhood. She used to beat people up for me. I had blonde hair and I used to get picked on by the bigger boys and she would always appear like the Lone Ranger over the hill.

“When she died a few years ago I felt a real longing for my sister. In the church, I thought, she’ll never save me again, I’m alone and I felt emptiness. Flo was dead, there was no going back. I had to carry her out and I was crying, my Flo was dead and it had a profound effect on me. I miss her bravery.”

Billy Connolly Does… returns to, Gold on March 30 at 9pm, with all three episodes available as a boxset on Sky, Virgin and Now.