Billy Connolly has said he is “slipping away” as his Parkinson’s disease progresses, in a candid TV programme reflecting on his life and career.
Connolly, known as The Big Yin, announced his retirement from touring last month, telling the Radio Times that he could no longer handle the “rigmarole of getting around”.
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“My life is slipping away and I can feel it, and I should, I’m 75,” he says in the second part of the BBC documentary Made in Scotland, recorded before he turned 76 in November.
“I’m near the end but it doesn’t frighten me,” he adds in a clip from the programme, which will air on BBC Two on Friday, saying that it was “quite interesting” to observe the effects of the incurable degenerative condition.
“As bits slip off and leave me, talents leave and attributes leave,” he says. “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.”
At one point in the programme, he “reportedly asks for filming to stop as he appears to be struggling with the effects of Parkinson’s”, Sky News reports.
However, last year both Connolly and his wife, Pamela Stephenson, hit out at former chat show host Michael Parkinson’s suggestion that the condition had “dulled his brain” to the point that he no longer recognised friends.
Speaking to ITV last August, Parkinson claimed that he and Connolly, long-time friends, had shared an “awkward dinner” during which he “wasn’t quite sure if [Connolly] knew who I was or not”.
Stephenson responded with a tweet calling Parkinson a “daft old fart” and assuring fans that her husband was “doing great”.
Connolly himself insisted that he “would recognise Parky if he was standing behind me - in a diving suit”, and said that the comments had “made my life a bit difficult”.