Terry Jones: Member of Monty Python 1942-2020
● Terry Jones, who has died at the age of 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 characters, though he also became familiar as the nude organist appearing in interludes between 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 the “Monsieur 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, on February 1 1942. After school, where he was head boy, captain of the rugby team and a crack shot in the Cadet Corps, he went to Oxford, where he soon became involved in the theatre, writing and appearing in revues.
It was at Oxford that he met his fellow future Python, Palin. After graduating in 1965, both men joined the BBC. In 1968 Jones and Palin were working with Idle and the American artist Gilliam on Do Not
Adjust Your Set when Cleese suggested they join him and his writing partner 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.
After debating suggestions for a title (Jones liked Chapman’s “Toad Elevating Moment”), they decided on “Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot”, only to be told to think again by the BBC, just as the programme title was due to go in the Radio Times. 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 vs the Oxford team of Palin and Jones. The Oxford team’s humour was more visual and anarchic, the cerebral Jones envisioning a stream-ofconsciousness approach with sketches which did not necessarily have any comedic rationale or punchlines but moved fluidly from one to another with much crossreferencing of jokes. Cleese and Chapman’s humour was more punning and verbal, and Cleese wanted a conventional structure with sketches that were clearly funny.
While the tensions between the two factions undoubtedly spurred both sides to heights of competitive 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. 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. Later, Jones had success with Personal Services (1986) and The Wind in the Willows (1996), in which he also starred as Toad.
Jones had always been fascinated by the medieval period and, during the filming of Holy Grail, he 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.
Jones’s 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.
As a writer, Jones co-wrote Ripping Yarns with Palin, the screenplay for Labyrinth (1986) and numerous works for children, including Fantastic Stories and The Beast with a Thousand Teeth.
In 1970 Jones 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 in which he said he and his wife had an “open” marriage and that they had both taken lovers. Shortly afterwards, he began a relationship with Anna Söderström, a Swedish Python fan more than four decades his junior who he had met at a book signing — whereupon his wife threw him out of the family home.
Jones, who suffered from dementia in later years, is survived by Söderström and by his children from his first marriage and a daughter from his second.