Sir Billy Connolly

Billy Connolly: ‘I think about death quite a lot now. I don’t think I’ve got that long’

The comedian talks to Charlotte Edwardes about Parkinson’s, retirement and his long life in stand-up

I’m having a bit of a sad time,” Billy Connolly says 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 has 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.” He never was good at “dope”. His friends teased him for his “five-cents-a-day habit”. He’d like the feeling for a minute but then “wish it would go away and let me be”. 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’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 Connolly 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.

read the full article on The Times