Comic's frank reflection on his declining powers

Billy Connolly has accepted that his life is ‘slipping away’.

The 76-year-old comedian reflects that he is ‘at the wrong end of the telescope of life’ in the BBC documentary Made In Scotland, which will air tomorrow night.

‘I am at the point where the yesteryears mean more than the yesterdays,’ he reveals in the programme. ‘Because it is back there in my childhood and youth when I go to all those things that made me that live keenest in my memory now.’

In the film, made before he turned 76 in November, the Big Yin added: ‘My life, it’s slipping away and I can feel it and I should. I’m 75, I’m near the end. I’m a damn sight nearer the end than I am the beginning. 

‘But it doesn’t frighten me, it’s an adventure and it is quite interesting to see myself slipping away.’

‘As bits slip off and leave me, talents leave and attributes leave. I don’t have the balance I used to have, I don’t have the energy I used to have. I can’t hear the way I used to hear, I can’t see as good as I used to.

‘I can’t remember the way I used to remember. And they all came one at a time and they just slipped away, thank you.

‘It is like somebody is in charge of you and they are saying, "Right, I added all these bits when you were a youth, now it is time to subtract."

‘I can’t work my left hand on the banjo. It is as if I am being prepared for something. Some other adventure, which is over the hill.’

The comic has cut back on his work as his Parkinson’s disease, diagnosed in 2013, has taken hold and says he may have already filmed his last major TV show.

He adds of his condition: ‘It takes a certain calm to deal with, and I sometimes don’t have it. I sometimes get angry with it, but that doesn’t last long, I just collapse in laughter.’

Billy Connolly: Made In Scotland will air on BBC Two at 9pm on Friday

Published: 3 Jan 2019