Billy Connolly, knighted last year, has announced he will tour no more. Aged 76, he has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for some time.
Currently living in Florida for his health, he has made this last hurrah, travelling around the state, enjoying himself mightily.
At no point does he seem any the worse for wear, but he doesn’t go any further than Key West to Miami. While he maintains he’s “still discovering thrilling stuff round every corner”, the programme itself takes a more elegiac turn, by including snippets from his travel programmes from the previous 25 years.
Billy goes saltwater fly-fishing, hoping to land a tarpon — but “really it’s about being at peace and being relaxed and loose”, as his admiring guide says. “All the films they’ve made of me fishing — I’ve never caught a fish on camera and I don’t care,” Billy chortles, proving the point with clips from the River Ness in 2004 and Canada in 2009.
He inspects a local American crocodile — and then we see him feeding crocs in Australia back in 1996. “Beautiful creatures,” he says back then. “Two hundred million years old, so it should be quite good at what it does — in 200 million years you could get pretty good at anything. I would be able to play the banjo properly in 200 million years.” The long view.
Such travel shows, giving us the world by proxy, have always needed great charm to make good watching: Connolly has always had it and he has it still. “The on-the-road thing was always important to me, it gives you a certain love of the world, and it’s taught me to like where I come from,” he says, speaking now over footage of a visit to Loch Lomond back in 1994.
“I remember standing on the shores of Loch Lomond at Inversnaid and the sky was beautiful. I remember that line, ‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead, he never to himself has said, this is my own, my native land’.”
“I don’t like to look like a bagpiper, with heather in my ears, you know,” he says to camera, wearing a pretty lurid Hawaiian shirt in Florida, “but sometimes your love of a 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.”
Anybody who has ever liked Billy Connolly will be touched by this programme, a celebration of a life well lived. True, it verges on the sentimental, and even the sententious, at points. Towards the end he tells us: “You can see all the sights in the world — you can see the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, all that but if you don’t make a friend you haven’t done it right.” Both true and corny, more corny than he might have been when fired-up back in the day.
But then we also see him, horrifically, dancing naked around standing stones in Orkney in 1994, in Australia in 1996, and out in the snow in the Arctic in 1995. “You have to be out of shape to do it. If you’re in shape, it looks like you’re showing off. When you’re like me, you’re like a tortured question mark, it becomes funny,” he explains over this appalling footage.
“When I dance naked, I sing to myself: ‘There were three ships on Christmas Day, on Christmas day in the morning’, ta da da da di da da! That’s the tune I dance to when I’m naked,” he says, cheerfully conducting his younger self along. Way to go.
