Not the messiah, just a very funny man
Terry Jones, who has died aged 77, was one of the six original members of the Monty Python team, alongside John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman and the animator Terry Gilliam.
A swarthy, large-featured man, Jones specialised in the show’s cast of bizarre middle-aged women, though he also became familiar as the nude organist who appeared in interludes between the main sketches.
Perhaps his most famous creation was the mother in Monty Python’s Life of
Brian, who yells at her son’s devoted followers: ‘‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.’’
Jones also directed three Python films
– Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life – and was responsible for one of the most grotesque pieces of humour ever committed to screen: the ‘‘Mr Creosote’’ sequence in
The Meaning of Life, in which he played a gourmand who explodes after eating a gargantuan meal.
Terence Graham Parry Jones, the son of a bank clerk, was born in Colwyn Bay, Wales. While he was still a boy the family moved to Surrey, where he excelled at school as head boy, captain of the rugby team and a crack shot in the cadet corps.
He won a place to read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he soon became involved in the theatre, writing and appearing in revues. It was at Oxford that he met his future Python Michael Palin and, after graduating in 1965, both joined the BBC, writing and performing in shows such as The Frost Report, the children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set, The Complete And Utter History Of Britain and At Last The 1948 Show alongside the likes of David Frost, David Jason, Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor and the ‘‘two Ronnies’’, Barker and Corbett.
In 1968 Jones and Palin were working with Eric Idle and the American artist Terry Gilliam on Do Not Adjust Your Set when John Cleese suggested they join him and his writing partner Graham Chapman to work on a new show. Although no-one had a name for it or any idea about what form it should take, the BBC obligingly gave them a commission for a 13-episode series of comedies.
After debating various suggestions for a title (Jones’ preferred option was Chapman’s suggested ‘‘Toad Elevating Moment’’), they eventually decided on ‘‘Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot’’, only to be told to think again by the BBC. They then opted for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Deciding the show’s format was more tricky, owing to the rivalry between the two main writing factions: the Cambridge duo of Cleese and Chapman v the Oxford team of Palin and Jones.
The Oxford team’s humour was more visual and anarchic, the cerebral Jones envisioning a stream-of-consciousness approach to programme structure with sketches that did not necessarily have any comedic rationale or punchlines, but moved fluidly from one to another with much cross-referencing of jokes.
Cleese and Chapman’s humour was more punning and verbal, and Cleese, in particular, wanted a more conventional structure with sketches that were clearly funny.
While the tensions undoubtedly spurred both sides to heights of creativity, it led to rifts and rows. Jones, according to Palin, felt undervalued and ‘‘oppressed’’ by Cleese’s dismissive handling of his suggestions, and angry at the way Cleese seemed to expect the Oxford men to do the tedious donkey work.
‘‘My big hero is Buster Keaton because he made comedy look beautiful ... The way it looks is crucial, particularly because we were doing silly stuff.’’ Jones on directing
When, in 1973, they decided to call it a day, so deep were the divisions that the final six shows were made with little or no contribution from Cleese.
The Pythons continued to work together, though never very harmoniously, on a series of feature films. Jones, who had taken an active interest in directing on the television shows, shared the director’s credit with Gilliam on Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), before taking sole charge on The Life of
Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983), their last film as a team.
‘‘My big hero is Buster Keaton because he made comedy look beautiful,’’ Jones told David Morgan for the book Monty
Python Speaks! ‘‘He didn’t say, ‘Oh it’s comedy, so we don’t need to bother about the way it looks.’ The way it looks is crucial, particularly because we were doing silly stuff. It has to have an integrity to it.’’
Lucrative onstage reunion shows followed, brimming with fans who mouthed all the lines. The phenomenon reached Broadway in 2005 with Spamalot, based on Holy
Grail. Junk email is called spam in homage to one celebrated sketch, featuring Jones as a waitress who recites a menu featuring an overload of the canned lunch meat in every item.
Python was often at its finest when at its most meaningless: a fish-slapping dance, a tradesman who sells dead parrots, a cross-dressing lumberjack who sings (Jones co-wrote the ditty, a burlesque of rugged manliness), and a civil servant who approves government grants for silly walks.
Jones brought a warped commitment to his characters. They included a naked organist, Karl Marx as a hapless quiz show contestant, a buffoonish cardinal in the Spanish Inquisition who helps torture victims with soft cushions and the dreaded comfy chair, and a stuffy pubgoer who is subjected to befuddling sexual insinuations (‘‘Nudge-nudge, snap-snap, grin-grin, wink-wink, say no more’’).
Later, Jones had success with Personal Services (1986) and The Wind in the Willows (1996), in which he also starred as Toad. Eric the Viking (1989) was less successful commercially.
He had always been fascinated by the medieval period and, during the filming of Holy Grail, spent hours in the British Library working on what would become
Chaucer’s Knight (1980), a controversial but acclaimed study in which he suggested that the poet was being ironic in his account of chivalrous knighthood.
His interest in medieval history led him into a new career as the presenter of popular history programmes for the BBC, and as a lecturer and speaker at literary festivals. On television he presented series on the crusades (1996); Ancient
Inventions (1998); a jaunty eight-part series, Medieval Lives (2004); and Barbarians (2006).
He lectured on Chaucer at Oxford and Cambridge – and even at Liege, where he sent an audience of Belgian Python fans to sleep with his standard one-and-a-halfhour Chaucer seminar and slide show. As a writer, Jones co-wrote Ripping
Yarns with Palin, the screenplay for the film Labyrinth (1986), starring David Bowie, and numerous works for children, including Fantastic Stories and The Beast with a Thousand Teeth.
He occasionally wrote for The
Observer, The Guardian and The Daily
Telegraph, emerging as a strident critic of the ‘‘despicable’’ Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. Many of his articles were published in a paperback collection, Terry Jones’ War on the War on Terror (2005).
In 1970, he married Alison Telfer, a scientist he had met at Oxford and with whom he had a son and daughter. In 2005 he gave an interview explaining that he and his wife had an ‘‘open’’ marriage and that they each had lovers.
Shortly afterwards, he began a relationship with Anna Soderstrom, a Swedish Python fan more than four decades his junior whom he had met at a book signing – whereupon Telfer threw him out of the family home in Camberwell, south London.
Jones, who had been suffering from dementia in later years, is survived by Soderstrom and by the children of his first marriage and a daughter of his second. –