CLASS ACT

Fans were stunned when Billy Connolly dropped the bombshellthat he was bowing out after a 60-year career in comedy. In this interview the Scottish legend opens up about the toll thatParkinson’s had taken on his body and how the disease has forced him to come to terms with death

- CHARLOTTE EDWARDES

BILLY Connolly doesn’t mince his words. “I’m having a bit of a sad time,” the comedian admits when I ask how he is. “Nothing’s working.”

His shoulder twitches in a shrug. This is the effect of Parkinson’s disease and “happens every now and again”, he says. He’s tried a range of alternative treatments, including cannabis, “but I get bombed out of my head. And I don’t like it. My daughter bought me cigarettes with CBD. It helped a little, but not enough to write home about”.

Instead he practises daily meditation and takes seven boring prescription pills. “They keep me steady. I seem to be on the medium to mild side. Take a walk on the mild side,” he quips.

He’s in the car, stationary in the driveway of his house in Florida, because that’s the only place he can get a signal, and he’s looking at me on the screen of his daughter’s phone. Outside the air is humid. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and tiny round wizardy specs, like goggles against his powder-white hair. He seems, not helpless exactly, but bewildered without the furious energy that made him the big, angry Scottish stand-up, humour like a flashing steel blade.

He’s upright and sombre in his chair, looking like a Russian Orthodox priest. Then the picture freezes and disappears, and we have to continue just on the phone.

He no longer sounds exactly like the old Billy Connolly either, because he’s not roaring at 400 words a minute. Answers are short-winded now. Pauses turn into full stops.