A MASTER OF THE ABSURD
Terry Jones 1942-2020
Terry Jones, who has died aged 77, shot to fame in the early 1970s as a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus – the six-strong troupe whose anarchic, iconoclastic TV sketch show captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and changed the face of comedy. As well as appearing on screen in a variety of bizarre guises, he co-wrote some of the Pythons’ most memorable sketches, and directed three of their feature films. Such was their impact, he was forever after referred to as the “ex Python”, said The Times, yet he had many other strings to his bow. He wrote screenplays and children’s books, and was a keen amateur historian of the medieval period. Gregarious, effusive and affable, he once said that he was glad he had gone to the University of Oxford, because he met two men there who changed his life: Michael Palin and Geoffrey Chaucer.
Terry Jones was born in Colwyn Bay in 1942, and brought up in Surrey, where his father worked in a bank. As a boy, he listened to the Goons on the radio, and was entranced. “It was the surreality of the imagery and the speed of the comedy that I loved,” he wrote. He was a star pupil at the Royal Grammar School in Guildford, and from there won a place to read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Joining the Experimental Theatre Club, he started writing and performing material with Palin, a fellow undergraduate, who would become a lifelong friend. On graduating, they found work at the BBC, and in the late 1960s, collaborated with Eric Idle and the American animator Terry Gilliam on the surreal children’s sketch show Do Not Adjust Your Set. Soon after, John Cleese and his writing partner Graham Chapman (who had met at Cambridge) contacted them, suggesting they produce some material for a new show together. Conveniently, the BBC offered them a 13-episode series. Their first choice of a name for the troupe was Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot, but the BBC rejected it, so they settled on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “It’ll never catch on,” was Jones’s brother’s verdict. They then had to decide the show’s format – which was trickier, said The Daily Telegraph. Jones and Palin – the “Oxford men” – had a more “visual, anarchic” humour, a freewheeling, stream of consciousness approach that did not depend on punchlines; the “Cambridge men” favoured more structured sketches, with puns and sharp, clearly-signalled jokes.
This tension proved creative: the Flying Circus was a massive hit, leading to records, books and (later) “concert” tours. But behind the scenes, there was considerable disharmony. The Pythons disbanded in 1973, before reuniting in 1975 for the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Jones co-directed it with Gilliam before taking the reins solo on Life of Brian (1979), a satire about a young Jewish man who is mistaken for Jesus. He also starred in the film and, as Brian’s mother, Mandy, he delivered its most famous line: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” Although the film is not about Christ, Life of Brian was banned as blasphemous in Ireland and by several councils in the UK. Jones also directed The Meaning of Life (1983), in which he played Mr Creosote, the obese diner who explodes in a smart restaurant after eating a “wafer-thin” mint.
Jones’s later films as a director included Personal Services (1987), about the British “madam” Cynthia Payne. He wrote the screenplay for the David Bowie film Labyrinth (1986), and several highly regarded popular histories. In the 2000s, he had a column in The Guardian, which he used to rail against the US invasion of Iraq. Jones was married first to Alison Telfer, with whom he had two children. He left her in 2009, to marry his lover Anna Söderström, whom he had met at a book signing when she was 23. They had one daughter, in 2009, and married in 2012. He was diagnosed with a form of dementia in 2016. Asked once what he’d like written on his gravestone, Jones said he didn’t want to be remembered as a Python, but for his children’s books, and the “academic stuff”. Those, he said, “are my best bits”.