Billy Connolly’s most intimate interview yet (by his wife): ‘Comedians never used to worry about what was correct to say. You said it, and soon found out’

Billy Connolly and his wife, Pamela Stephenson Connolly, photographed in Key West, Florida, September 2023. Photograph: Nick Doll

Sir William Connolly, AKA Billy Connolly, AKA the Big Yin, the Glaswegian welder-turned-folk-singer-turned-comedian has been my partner for over 40 years. When Billy and I met, I was a comedian appearing in the BBC’s popular topical comedy programme Not The Nine O’Clock News, but since then I have become a psychologist, author, dance enthusiast and regular Guardian columnist.

Billy and I have five children between us. We married in Fiji (my mother’s birthplace) then settled in the United States in the late 80s, living first in California, where Billy was under contract to Warner Brothers. We subsequently moved to New York after our children finished school, and we currently reside in the Florida Keys, where the ‘fishing is easy’ and (in Billy’s words) ‘the sun comes clattering down’. Our move to Florida was prompted by a need to situate Billy in a more relaxed place, without the extremes of temperature one experiences in New York. As is the case in Billy’s beloved Glasgow, for him a cold winter is accompanied by the likelihood of his slipping on ice and ‘falling on my arse’. So for now, our alternative environmental hazards are hurricanes, aggressive grackles and iguana poop.