Billy Connolly's Route 66 was a British documentary television series presented by Billy Connolly upon his travels along the famous U.S. road - Route 66.[1] The series, which consisted of four episodes, was shown on ITV1 and first episode aired at 9pm on 15 September, 2011.[2][3]
The show was filmed between April and June in 2011.[4] Connolly drove the whole distance of the 2488-mile route on a motorized tricycle, despite being hospitalized for a week after he crashed on the border near Arizona and New Mexico, breaking a rib and gashing his knee.[5]
The journey along Route 66 began in Chicago, Illinois, in the first episode of the series; it featured the Willis Tower - the tallest building in the United States - before Connolly met the state's champion pie-maker, an Amish family, and two women in St. Louis, Missouri, whose homes had been destroyed by a tornado.[6] The second episode started as the first had finished in St. Louis, where Connolly climbed the gateway arch. Now in the American West, Connolly then visited a wolf sanctuary, participated in a Civil War re-enactment, hunted turkeys, sat in the world's largest rocking chair and visited a memorial to the 168 victims of the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in 1995 in Oklahoma City.[7] In the third episode Connolly joined in on a cattle drive in Oklahoma City, before he travelled to Texas to visit the ghost town of Glenrio and Devil's Rope Museum. He later met two men who helped to create the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico and took part in a rodeo in Arizona.[8] In the fourth and final episode, Connolly visited both a massive meteorite crater and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He also visited sanctuary for unwanted exotic pets, where he fed a lion cub, and met a campaigner who was trying to keep the historic route 66 alive.[9]