Python who very was a naughty boy!
He was a comic icon whose Life Of Brian ‘Messiah’ gag was voted Britain’s favourite – and whose genius made him a fortune. But when Terry Jones, who’s died aged 77, left his wife for a lover 41 years younger, he really did become the...
Terry Jones was the most scholarly of the Pythons, as well as the funniest. He wrote books about Chaucer, presented documentaries on the History Channel about gladiators, the crusades and barbarians, and published articles in obscure journals devoted to Medieval english.
But so what? What immortalises Terry is his portrayal in Monty Python’s Life of Brian of the Virgin Mandy, shrilly seeing off the gathering crowds, saying of her son (Brian): ‘He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.’
Jones, who has died aged 77 after a long battle with dementia, was one of the most funny men of his generation. His surreal humour stamped itself on our consciousness as he assembled madcap gags about exploding lettuces, dead parrots, cheese shops and Upper Class Twit of The year competitions.
Material about cardinals, lumberjacks, silly walks and folk dancing involving slapping each other with wet fish — all of these he helped weave into free-flowing narrative structures, sketches that stopped and started at whim, so that the whole Python show was like a demented music hall bill, prone to interruptions and deliberate illogicality, as exemplifed by Jones playing the organ . . . in the nude.
Teenagers, like me at the time, lapped it up. It seemed so non-adult, but clever, too.
Jones formed Monty Python alongside John Cleese, eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman in 1969, after they all met for a ‘brainstorm’ in a tandoori restaurant in north London.
It was 20 years later, in 1989, that the first of them, Graham Chapman, died of cancer. Which explains why, after Jones’s family issued a statement yesterday confirming his death Cleese, 80, said: ‘Two down, four to go.’
He added: ‘It feels strange that a man of so many talents and such endless enthusiasm, should have faded so gently away . . .’ In addition to the TV shows, Jones was a mainstay of the Python films, both as a director and playing roles such as Virgin Mandy and that other iconic character Mr Creosote in The Meaning of Life. He always looked well fed — not fat exactly, but comfortably upholstered — and his gourmandising is represented in the famous scene in the film where Mr Creosote waddles into a posh restaurant.
Hidden under vast layers of special effects rubber, Terry is convincing as the world’s most obese man, who gobbles down buckets of food.
Given a tiny after-dinner mint, he finally explodes, his intestines and bones flung far and wide. It is brilliantly done — quite grotesque.
But Terry’s ability on stage and screen was matched by a colourful and, in recent years, tragic private life in which he left his wife of 26 years for a woman 41 years his junior — before suffering a few years later from a rare form of dementia.
For some time before walking out on Alison Telfer, a biochemist, and their two children, he had claimed — reportedly to her fury — that they had an open marriage and that both took lovers without it affecting their relationship.
yet when news broke in 2005 of his relationship with Anna soderstrom, then a 23-year-old modern languages student at oxford whom he had met at a book signing, it shocked Python fans the world over. Jones was seen as zany but avuncular — not the sort to run off with a young brunette with a passion for belly-dancing.
However, the couple remained together for the rest of his life, had a daughter, siri, in 2009 and married in a secret ceremony in Highgate, north London, in 2012. The only guests were Terry’s next-door neighbours.
By this stage, Jones had got through much of his Python and film earnings, lumbered himself with an interest- only mortgage of £700,000 and needed money — hence his willingness to take part in the Pythons’ live shows at the o2 Arena in 2014.
It was a somewhat sorry spectacle, seeing these elderly gentlemen go through their ancient routines, parroting the catchphrases (about dead parrots). But what was really unsettling was that Jones couldn’t remember his lines.
DEGENERATIVE aphasia was, at last, officially diagnosed, one of the symptoms being an unawareness of the consequences of one’s behaviour.
The final years were devastating. Terry stopped being able to converse at dinner parties, which were his passion. ‘For someone who lived by words and discussions, this was tragic,’ said a family member.
His speech deteriorated fast. He lost the ability to communicate and his behaviour became ever more erratic. He was a figure of true pathos at the Bafta Cymru Awards in 2016 and he retired from public view.
Physically, he remained robust, enjoying his beer and cakes. He still liked to hike across Hampstead Heath, and once left the comic writer Barry Cryer and others sprawling in the mud. ‘ There I was in the mud, whilst my friend who had dementia was striding off miles ahead, completely unconcerned,’ said a friend.
For his family and fellow Pythons his demise was agony to watch. sir Michael Palin pretended to be philosophic: ‘At least Terry doesn’t shout or show his bottom.’ But in truth, he was heartbroken.
Jones met Palin, who became his writing partner, at oxford, where he had won a place from a Guildford grammar school (the family had moved to surrey from Colwyn Bay, where he was born).
It was at oxford, under the guidance of his tutor, reggie Alton, that Terry fell in love with defunct languages and their long- lost swords-and-sorcery world.
PALIN was always to remember with fondness the way Terry was a good companion, with ‘ an insatiable sense of wonder and discovery’. He wore an air of slightly startled innocence, which made him brilliant at playing those eccentric ratbags in the Monty Python series — drag roles based on his mother, who died in 1972 from a stroke.
Jones was upset not to have seen her in hospital, as he was abroad on a Python tour. It was fellow Python Graham Chapman, a qualified doctor, who told him there was no point bankrupting yourself chartering a private jet to see someone who was fatally unconscious.
Palin and Jones, who made each other laugh, were enviably successful as soon as they graduated, and never short of employment. There was no struggling phase.
They worked on The Frost report, wrote sketches for Marty Feldman and The Two ronnies, did a panto in Glasgow and made lucrative commercials for the Midland Bank, Guinness beer and Gibbs toothpaste.
surrealism was their hallmark, derived from The Goon show. It is fair to say that the Pythons put on the TV screen in the late sixties the same sort of silliness spike Milligan and Peter sellers, along with Harry secombe, had essayed on the radio.
There were 45 episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which first began broadcasting on the BBC late at night in 1969 and ended in 1974 — except it never did seem to end.
There were wonderful film spinoffs; books, with titles such as The Monty Python Matching Tie And Handkerchief; record albums; live shows; re-packaged DVDs. A huge industry, which made the collaborators multi-millionaires.
The team often filmed on location in Torquay. It was here, at The Gleneagles Hotel, that they encountered the rude landlord Donald sinclair, who was the inspiration for Basil Fawlty.
sinclair put everyone’s luggage in the car park, claiming there’d been a bomb scare. He told Terry Gilliam to hold his cutlery properly. He didn’t
believe in the courtesy of providing wake-up calls.
Cleese was enchanted, and wrote his classic series, with Connie Booth, Andrew Sachs and Prunella Scales. Jones and Palin, too, wanted to have a career independent of the Pythons, and came up with Ripping Yarns.
These half-hour TV programmes were playlets in the tradition of Python spoofs about Scott of the Sahara or Biggles, Englishmen being brave and foolhardy.
Here we had dramas about Kipling’s India, officers and gentlemen in Colditz, and intrepid explorers in the Andes, played by real actors such as Denholm Elliott. There was a northern tale, The Testing Of Eric Olthwaite. Jones and Palin loved playing dim Yorkshiremen.
But it was always to the Pythons that everyone returned. Jones co- directed The Holy Grail with Terry Gilliam. There were tensions, difficulties over compromising and collaborating.
Gilliam, as his subsequent career demonstrates, had a magnificent eye, a lavish cinematographic style in the Orson Welles class. But he can be overblown. It was the other Terry, Terry Jones, who got the jokes and routines across.
Jones directed Life Of Brian on his own. This was made in Tunisia, using leftover sets from Franco Zeffirelli’s epic Life Of Jesus. Religious spokesmen were appalled, accusing him of blasphemy. This only boosted sales.
Off-screen, Jones was a generous host. In his diaries, Palin remembers feasts of antipasto, salmon, pheasant, chocolate mousse, cheese and lots of wine, served at the Jones home in Camberwell, South London, where the pair of them met each day to work on their scripts.
With Graham Chapman gone, Cleese always getting re-married, Idle wishing to live up to his name, Gilliam becoming the new Federico Fellini and Palin turning himself into a beloved travel show presenter, Jones felt he needed to find work to keep him from ‘the dangerous world of leisure’. In 1987, he directed Personal Services, a biopic about Cynthia Payne, a woman who ran a brothel where the clients paid in luncheon vouchers.
If it didn’t quite come off, it was because the story lacked fantasy, no scope for dragons or Arthurian mists. I much preferred Terry’s big-screen version of The Wind In The Willows, where to play Toad all he needed to do was paint his
face green. Steve Coogan was Mole, Eric Idle was Ratty, Nicol Williamson was Badger, Stephen Fry the Judge, John Cleese Toad’s barrister and Victoria Wood was the tea lady in the prison.
Despite the calibre of the cast, it flopped.
Terry attempted other fantasy films — Erik The Viking — and he worked on his serious study of Chaucer’s knight, published by Jonathan Cape to acclaim, where his argument was that he wasn’t chivalric and noble but a mercenary.
He helped fund an environmental magazine, The Vole, and invested in the Penrhos Brewery, in Herefordshire.
It was at this time that I met him — very briefly. At a party in 2002 at the Groucho Club in London, Jones ran into the room, looked astoundingly startled, and ran out, down the stairs, never to be seen at the party again.
Was it the beginnings of his dementia? The trouble with the disease is it is impossible to pinpoint when it begins. He later admitted, it caught up with him: ‘My frontal lobes have absconded.’
Towards the end he spent his days re-watching Billy Wilder’s classic film Some Like It Hot, to the extent that he wore out two DVDs. ‘We assume he’s happy,’ Palin said. ‘But we just don’t know.’
For once, the cliché is true: comic genius Terry Jones’s death, with his wife by his side, is a merciful release.