He is forever being voted the nation’s favourite comedian – most recently in the 100 Greatest Stand-ups list on Channel 4. But can Billy Connolly – his goatee beard and shaggy locks faded to grey, most of the past two decades spent living in America – really still claim to be the best we’ve got?

Yeah, pretty much. With this show, Too Old to Die Young, he’s bringing his familiar Glaswegian effusiveness to bear on the questions of death and decrepitude that will most dog a man of 64. He’s too spry to be raging against the dying of the light quite yet. But he is having the same furious fun with strokes and Songs of Praise that he once had with sex and folk singing.

Which isn’t to say that everything is tickety-boo with this, his first British show in three years. The endless chortling digressions that let him cram such a bounty of material into his two-hours-plus (no interval) can sap his energy. He is so comfortable on stage that he will even interrupt the end of a very strong — but very long – anecdote about visiting his father in a stroke ward to tell a slew of old Chick Murray jokes that have just sprung to mind. He suggests that this is a show about getting old and losing the plot, yet the show itself loses the plot too often to add up to a coherent statement.

Then again, who cares? When you’re as funny as this, you can leave the coherent statements to your accountant and get on with making people howl with laughter. Nobody else makes a big gig feel so intimate. He prowls the stage, in his black drainpipes and leather waistcoat, as if he were holding court in his kitchen. Every anecdote can call on a crack squad of rhythm, timbre, gesture, poise and infectious enjoyment to get it over. He is the complete comedian. So ordinary material becomes extraordinary; strong material simply soars. His nuking of New Age nonsense – “ fengshui is the flow of bull**** through a room” – is ten years past its sell-by date. Yet it comes embroidered with such delightful details that it scores anyway. He is both scoffer and cap-doffer: “It’s f***ing great!” he cackles with wonder as he passes on some outlandishly simple martial-arts tricks he learnt in New York.

He is, more than anything, enthused: it’s what keeps him the right side of grumpy-old-millionaire territory as he harrumphs at shoddy shopworkers, crystal enthusiasts (“F*** off! Get a job!”) and “allnight dancearamas” that clog up his world.

“I’ve given you too f***ing much for your own good,” he says at the end, and he’s right – he can’t quite keep all his plates spinning fast enough to sustain our rapture throughout. But, blimey, he comes close. He is 65 on November 24. And there is still no greater teller of a funny story working today than Billy Connolly.

— Next show tomorrow, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall: 0151-709 3789. Tour details: www.billyconnolly.com

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