WHAT to say about Sir Billy Connolly, surely Britain’s best-loved comedian? That esteem has only deepened with the courage and humour with which he has faced those illnesses which make life such a pain in the bahookey just when you’re thinking of sitting doon for a bit.

Having given prostate cancer the boot, it’s Parkinson’s disease we’re talking now, and anyone who can get a laugh out of that has to be admired. Thus Billy: “I have Parkinson’s disease and I wish he’d take it back.”

So, Billy Connolly, where to begin? I’m getting a message in my earpiece: “Begin at the beginning, big nose.”

Fair enough. We take our Tardis back to 24 November 1942 and a tenement flat in Anderston, Glasgow, where Billy made his first public appearance, “on the linoleum three floors up”. His Catholic parents were of partly Irish and partly Hebridean descent, making the boy a perfect Glaswegian.

It’s fair to say that, while good in parts, his childhood wasn’t all skipping through the meadows singing A Bee Sat On My Nose. His young mother, at her wit’s end with poverty and German bombing, left when he was four. After that, he was brought up by two resentful aunts in Partick who constantly told him he was “stupid”, which wasn’t very clever.

READ MORE RAB: Robert McNeil - Dye another day: Don’t let grey hair go to your head

As for his dad, it’s not anyone’s place to talk of other folks’ faithers. That said, Billy would be the first to agree that his own experience with pater was a bit hit or miss. Typically, the boy made the best of it, recalling how he enjoyed the sensation of “flying” through the air after another character-building altercation.

At school, he learned that he also enjoyed making people laugh, which he first did by sitting in a puddle. Well, you had to be there.

On leaving school, well, you all know the story, so I’ll keep it brief: welder in the shipyards; folk singer; Humblebums; the Last Supper; large yellow footwear; Parkinson (as in Michael, not affliction). Don’t think I’ve missed anything.

Though an adept banjo player, Billy confesses that he had “a voice like a goose farting in a fog”, and in his folk music days probably used it to best advantage in patter between songs. Besides, as he has pointed out, women do not find folk music an aphrodisiac.

READ MORE RAB: We need a new countryside code to make walkers smile and say hello

The art of improvising stories and observations between songs later played a big part in Billy’s success. In his live, much improvised comedy shows, he would often fly by the seat of his pants, dragging the audience along with him, wondering where they were going with this until – yay! – suddenly it all made sense and everyone was enjoying that sensation of flying with him.

Observation, as anyone can see, is another secret of comedy. The comedian keeps his or her eyes and ears open, and the big, daft world always provides. Billy’s humorous eye was really opened during his time in the shipyards. “It was a whole wee world,” he later recalled. A world long gone.

All these characters: “The guy in the blacksmith’s shop with the wee piece of wire found his head so that he could keep a cigarette in it and smoke while he was working …”; “Wull the gull” who would dive to catch any bits of piece thrown away; the “Great Voltaine”, an amateur magician:

“Think of a number.”

“Thirteen.”

“Correct”.

After leaving the shipyards, and finding folk music might manage without him, Billy made his stage debut in 1972 at the Cottage Theatre, Cumbernauld.

Soon building a cult following, a couple of albums came out and, in my youth, these were passed around at school along with works by Led Zeppelin and Yes.

Billy’s growing success was cemented when he appeared on The Parkinson Show, now fondly remembered mostly for his joke about, er, the use of the bottom gear in bicycling.

Having risen to the top with a bottom, along came the inevitable corollary: press intrusion. The press: aye, thaim. They poked around in his private life and, unsurprisingly, he didn’t take it well.

You and I are just normies that nobody’s ever heard of, but imagine what it would be like if your relationships were plastered around the papers, warts and all. Well, just warts most of the time with them. Pretty rotten.

What we can say on the positive side is that, in 1979, the Big Yin met his yang in New Zealand-born comedienne Pamela Stephenson, who’d stared in TV sketch show Not the Nine o’Clock News and is now a respected psychologist. They married in 1989. In 2001, she brought out an acclaimed biography (first of two) called Billy.

Billy was drinking for Scotland when he first met Pamela, but became teetotal in 1985. He has said that he misses it, the craic and everything, but when you’re drinking 30 brandies in one session you begin to notice that you and your head are starting to part company, and you can’t pretend any more that your liver is loving all this.

READ MORE RAB: Declaration of Arbroath. Scottish icons by Rab McNeil

Talking of pretence, Billy has also had a distinguished career as an actor, appearing in many films, including Mrs Brown, The Last Samurai and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. He has advised fans to make sure they don’t miss the first 15 minutes as he’s usually been killed off by then. As he lamented: “I’m the only guy I know who died in a f*****g Muppet movie.”

In 2018, Billy announced he was retiring from comedy – but not from life. During his career, he tackled all the great and controversial subjects of our time: flatulence, onanism, haemorrhoids. He now devotes much time to painting.

At the time of writing, he was last in the news getting his Covid jag – “nae bother” – in a supermarket near his house in Florida.

Ultimately, after several hefty skelps to help him on his way, life has been pretty good to Billy. But you have to be good to live first. And, without a doubt, he has been that.