BILLY Connolly comes to the phone, I can hear his breathing and his irrepressible laughter before he picks up the receiver.

BILLY Connolly comes to the phone, I can hear his breathing and his irrepressible laughter before he picks up the receiver.

"I've just come in the door," he says from his Aberdeenshire home.

"I've been out on my bike. Or should I say it's Steve Martin's bike. He left it here. It's the only one with tyres that have been pumped up."

While Billy's own bike may be a wreck, there's no doubt that the comedy legend - who's 65 on Saturday - is full of life, still riding hard into the wind. And not at all prepared to surrender to the advances of age.

His outlook is that of a man 20 years younger. But there has been a change. Conversation reveals a real warmth about his character, a sense that the once angry young man has been replaced by a decent older bloke.

For example, as tales of biking develop, it transpires that on a recent outing the world famous comic from Partick's racing bike picked up a puncture.

So there he was standing on a country road about ten miles from home and thinking how sore his bicycle-shoed feet were going to be that night.

So he did what all superstars do when they face a crippling walk - he stuck out his thumb and waited.

Luckily, Billy's prayers were answered. But the Irish bloke and his family in their camper van were shocked to see the long-haired figure in lycra.

They was even more shocked when Connolly invited them back to Candacraig - his baronial mansion home - for dinner.

If ever there was a notion that Billy Connolly had become distanced from his public, the bike story disproves that theory. If ever there was a notion he's distanced himself from Glasgow that idea is also halted when he talks about how the city supplied the tools of his humour.

"This is the only nation I've ever known that makes fun of it's own language," he enthuses.

"We have wee jokes, for example, like Did you hear about the lonely prisoner? He was in his cell.' "Now this is daft. But it's lovely. And it says a lot about the Glaswegian character."

THE FACE IS FAMILIAR BUT THE BEARD'S NOT THE SAME Billy had already shown that he could play the straight man in films like the Big Man, but his performance as John Brown opposite Dame Judi Dench's Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown led to a Bafta nomination	HILL-BILLY A friend to comics Steve Martin and Robin Williams, Billy was at the finish line to welcome Williams in 2000 after the American ran the hill race at the Lonach Highland Games in Strathdon, near the Big Yin's Highland home	PLAYING THE ACADEMIC.... Billy got his big US TV break in the popular sitcom, Head of the Class in 1990, playing an Oxford-educated professor. Despite many Americans struggling with his Glasgow accent, the role led to him landing his own sitcom, Billy, in 1992	...AND BECOMING ONE After a childhood of being told he would amount to nothing, Billy was overcome with emotion when he received an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University	BACK TO THE BIG SCREEN Billy in typically flamboyant mood, launching the comedy movie The Man Who Sued God, in 2003

He adds: "I remember Jimmy Logan singing a song, a parody of the Adam Faith hit, What Do You Want? and Jimmy sang it as a Glasgow coalman, What do you want if you don't want brickets. . . ' I love all of that."

That's not to say that Billy takes his working class audiences for granted. He admits there is a line you can't cross, where a comic could be seen to be taking the mickey.

"Stanley Baxter knew where that line was and he nailed it with his Parliamo Glasgow," he says.

"The audience don't want to be identified as working class. They've gone to the theatre with their good gear on. They want to be Mr and Mrs Theatre for the night.

"So it's hard to get an audience to look at itself from a distance. But Stanley got people to laugh at themselves."

So too has Connolly. Thousands of times since he walked out of the gates of Stephens shipyard for the last time.

But he reveals that the dream of becoming an entertainer began long before his shipyard apprenticeship.

"By the age of 13 I wanted to become a comedian. I had been to variety theatre and seen Jimmy Logan and Stanley Baxter and all these guys.

"Until that time the comedians I knew were English or American. But these Scottish guys were being funny in my accent. It blew me away. The light of possibility was switched on. And you can see what I've done with it."

Not half. After touring with Gerry Rafferty as one half of the Humblebums, his first live solo album, the world, as he may say himself in malapropism, was his lobster.

His first appearance on Michael Parkinson's Friday night chatshow in 1975 saw him propelled onto a world stage.

Since them he has stormed the pop charts, written plays and books, starred in his own US TV sitcom, won a Bafta nomination for his role as John Brown opposite Judi Dench in Mrs Brown and left tens if not hundreds of thousands of theatregoers around the world helpless with laughter.

But if you think Connolly found the transition from welder to star straightforward you have no idea.

He's far too clever not to be a natural worrier. And he admits it wasn't easy to make the leap from Glasgow, where he quickly became an icon, to the world stage.

I've had years of going to places and being a nobody, but yet being famous where you come from.

"It happens on stage as well, when you are set to try out new stuff. And you panic but then your brain says. Look, you know this stuff works. What the hell are you worrying about?' "This battle has to be constantly fought. You have to constantly stretch yourself."

The battle to constantly stretch himself, no doubt contributed to his much-publicised battle with the bottle. he says his marriage to former Not The Nine O'Clock news comedian Pamela Stephenson, now an analyst, saved his life.

He has however died on stage. His popularity in Britain endeared him to many other British entertainers including musicians such as Elton John but when Elton tried to give Billy a boost in America by using him as the opening act on his 1976 US tour, the gesture backfired.

Elton's US fans had no interest in an unknown Scot with an impenetrable accent.

"In Washington, some guy threw a pipe and it hit me right between my eyes," he told Michael Parkinson two years later. "They made me feel about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit."

Yet Connolly's drive to push the boundaries of comedy carries him through.

He has an amazing knack for spotting the ludicrous, highlighting the absurd, illuminating the ordinary and making it outrageously funny.

And he isn't afraid to enter into tricky territory; subjects he has used in his act include sex, blasphemy, bigotry, his father's illness and his aunts' cruelty.

It's been argued that by exploring these subjects with humour, Connolly has done much to strip away the taboos surrounding them.

"Comedy giants like Stanley and Jimmy Logan were subversive," he says.

"I loved that. You have to keep pushing forward."