Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World

Last year I worked for a few days with a film crew making a travelogue following Scottish comedian Billy Connolly on a 10,000-mile journey across the Canadian Arctic and then down through the Yukon and British Columbia. In July I took a couple of members of the crew on a location-scouting trip to Telegraph Creek, BC (see a photojournal of that trip here), then in September, I led the full crew down and spent a day working with Billy on the shoot there.

Billy is deathly afraid of bears (as were some of the crew members), so my job during the actual shoot was to watch over the crew with a rifle, as we were off in the middle of nowhere in country with a healthy bear population. I told them that shooting a bear would be the absolute last resort, if I was unable to scare it off, and that surprised them – they seemed to think that carrying a rifle means that you want to use it.

I’ve just received an email letting me know that the film is being shown in the UK starting in a couple of days, as a 4-part series entitled “Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World”. I’m hoping that other countries will pick this show up (including Canada, of course, and that seems to me to be a safe bet). There is a companion DVD to the series, and I was surprised to see that there’s a 320-page book as well. The book is already available at Amazon in Canada, so I expect that the DVD will be available shortly in a format I can use.

This was an experience I’d love to repeat – though frustrating at times, Billy and the crew were great to both work and relax with, it feels good to know that it was successful, and apparently our section turned out very well. I’m very excited about being able to see it some day soon.