The interesting thing about watching old television footage, remarks Billy Connolly halfway through In My Own Words (BBC One, Monday), is that you find yourself keeping a running total of all the people who have died. He says this while viewing clips from his prime as a comedian, where those cracking up at his profanity-strewn anecdotes include Michael Parkinson, Dennis Waterman and Eamonn Andrews – household names at the time but all long since departed.
Connolly is equally emotional reflecting on his friendship with the late Robin Williams, who championed the Glaswegian during his early attempts at breaking into American comedy. With a lump in his throat, he recalls Williams contacting him several days before his death by suicide in 2014. “He phoned me and said let’s have dinner,” recalls Connolly. “He said, ‘I love you’. I said, ‘that’s great’. He was dead on the weekend.”
Irish viewers of a particular vintage will recall Connolly’s frequent appearances on The Late Late Show when he would effortlessly reduce Gay Byrne to a chortling heap. In this affecting survey of his life, we see the comic work a similar magic on British talkshow host Parkinson in an instantly well-known 1975 appearance, which Connolly credits with breaking him outside Scotland. “That was a great moment. To see Parky melt like that – it made me a star.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, Connolly was notorious for his foul-mouthed style. Revisited today, it’s the surreal quality of his comedy that is most striking. For instance, the joke that made him famous on Parkinson was about a man who murdered his wife and then used her bum as a bike stand – a gag that in 2024 like lands like X-rated Flann O’Brien.
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Connolly is now 81 and lives in Key West, Florida, with his wife, Pamela Stephenson. It very different from the Glasgow tenements where he grew up. “Key West is great. Nobody bothers you. They don’t care if you’re rich or poor. Everybody gets along,” he says.
He is phlegmatic about his past and inclined to forgive those who did him wrong. He is shown footage from the 1990s in which he tells arts presenter Melvyn Bragg about the abusive aunt who raised him, saying, “Quite frankly, I would rather have gone to a children’s home.”
Thirty years on, he has amended his opinion. He recalls a man who actually was raised in a home telling Connolly how lucky he was not to have been sent to one. He is inclined to agree – but that doesn’t mean he has forgotten how he suffered as a kid. “It was cruel – it wasn’t right. I longed to be an adult.”
But adulthood brought its troubles, too. His first marriage foundered as he became famous. And his second, to comedian Stephenson, was almost ruined by his chronic boozing. “I thought I might lose my wildness,” he says of giving up drinking. “It’s not wildness – it’s pretend wildness. I don’t have any regrets.”
In his 80s, Connolly has not lost his twinkle. He’s had his health struggles, having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2013 and retiring from performing six years ago. But he has not been consumed by melancholy, and while he finds the past an interesting place to visit, he does not pine for it. This moving documentary makes for a breezy and informative celebration of his life and times and also a refreshing portrait of the artist as an old man who continues to take on the world with youthful vivacity.
