What did Sir Michael Parkinson and Sir Billy Connolly fall out over and did they make up?

Sir Billy Connolly made his debut appearance on the late Sir Michaell Parkinson’s chart show ‘Parkinson’ in 1975, which propelled him to virtually a household name overnight. The Yorkshire Post explained that “Sir Billy was an unknown making a living on the Scottish club circuit when Sir Michael gave his big break in 1975. The comic was reportedly recommended to the chat show host by a cab driver.”

Over the years, Sir Billy Connolly appeared on Sir Michael Parkinson’s show numerous times and is believed to have held the record for the most appearances (15 in total). Sir Billy Connolly appeared on Sir Michael Parkinson’s penultimate show in 2007. 

According to the Daily Mail in 2019, “In August 2018, the pair fell out when the broadcaster spoke out about the comic’s (Sir Billy Connolly) battle with Parkinson’s disease, saying that his ‘wonderful brain has dulled.’ The article goes on to say that “Shortly afterwards, Billy’s wife Pamela Stephenson, 68, hit back, branding the broadcaster a ‘daft old fart’ and insisted her husband was ‘doing great.”

However, Sir Michael Parkinson addressed this ‘falling out’ with Sir Billy Connolly when he appeared on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories in 2019. “I don’t think it was Billy so much as Pamela,” he said. “I think so. I would never deliberately hurt Billy at all. When I was making the observation I was making, that he’d slowed down a bit, it was not a diagnosis, it was the observation of a friend to another friend.”

Sir Michael Parkinson then explained that he wrote Sir Billy a letter. “I sat down and wrote him a letter and said, ‘there is no way in this world I would hurt you, or deliberately demean you’ and I got a lovely reply saying ‘let’s go back to how we were, old friends.”