Billy Connolly's Route 66

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Billy Connolly's Route 66
Title screen graphic
Title card
Genre Documentary
Presented by Billy Connolly
Country of origin United Kingdom
Original language(s) English
No. of series 1
No. of episodes 4
Production
Production location(s) United States
Production company(s) Maverick Television
Release
Original network ITV, STV, UTV
Original release 15 September (2011-09-15) –
6 October 2011 (2011-10-06)
Chronology
Related shows Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World
External links
Production website

Billy Connolly's Route 66 is a British documentary television series presented by Billy Connolly. It focused on his travels along the famous United States highway Route 66.[1] The series, which consisted of four episodes, was shown on the British television network ITV. The first episode aired at 9pm on 15 September 2011.[2][3]

Production

Footage for the series was shot between April and June 2011.[4] Connolly rode a trike the entire length of the 2,488-mile (4,004 km) route, despite being hospitalized for a week after he crashed at the border near Arizona and New Mexico, which resulted in a broken rib and a gash in his knee.[5] Unlike Connolly's previous travelogues this series does not feature Connolly performing stand up comedy on his travels and purely focuses on the sights and the people that Connolly meets along the way.

Episodes

In the first episode, Connolly's journey along Route 66 began in Chicago, Illinois (the start of Route 66), and reached St. Louis, Missouri, as an initial destination. The show featured the Willis Tower (the tallest building in the United States at the time) as a lead-in to Connolly's meeting with an Illinois champion pie-maker, an Amish family and two female St. Louis residents whose homes were destroyed by a tornado.[6]

The second episode started where the first one finished—in St. Louis, with Connolly climbing the Gateway Arch. Now in the American West, Connolly visited a wolf sanctuary, participated in a Civil War re-enactment, hunted for turkey, sat in the world's largest rocking chair and visited a memorial commemorating the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which 168 people lost their lives in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.[7]

In the third episode, Connolly joined a cattle drive in Oklahoma City, before he moved onward to Texas to visit the ghost town of Glenrio and the Devil's Rope Museum. He later met two men who helped to create the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico before taking part in a rodeo in Arizona.[8]

In the fourth and final episode of Route 66, Connolly visited a massive meteorite crater as well as the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He took the viewers into a sanctuary for unwanted exotic pets, where he fed a lion cub and met with a campaigner who was trying to keep the historic Route 66 alive.[9] Connolly's journey concluded at the end of Route 66 in Santa Monica.[10]

Ratings

Episode No. Airdate Total viewers Weekly channel ranking
1 15 September 2011 5.66m 16
2 22 September 2011 5.01m 19
3 29 September 2011 4.57m 16
4 6 October 2011 4.58m 19

See also

References

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