Terry
Jones, Life of Brian director and Monty Python founder, dies aged 77
Jones, who
was diagnosed with dementia in 2015, was the main directing force in Python’s
films, as well a prolific creator of TV documentaries and children’s books
Terry
Jones: the Monty Python director – and a very naughty boy
Andrew
Pulver
@Andrew_Pulver
Wed 22 Jan
2020 13.45 GMTFirst published on Wed 22 Jan 2020 12.48 GMT
Terry
Jones, founder member of Monty Python and director of three of Python’s
celebrated feature films, has died aged 77, his family have announced. In a
statement they said: “Terry passed away on the evening of 21 January 2020 at
the age of 77 with his wife Anna Soderstrom by his side after a long, extremely
brave but always good humoured battle with a rare form of dementia, FTD.”
“Over the
past few days his wife, children, extended family and many close friends have
been constantly with Terry as he gently slipped away at his home in North
London. We have all lost a kind, funny, warm, creative and truly loving man
whose uncompromising individuality, relentless intellect and extraordinary
humour has given pleasure to countless millions across six decades.”
In 2016,
Jones and his family revealed he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal
dementia a year earlier, and he became a public face of the illness – appearing
at a Bafta Cymru awards ceremony to highlight its effects and being interviewed
in conjunction with longtime friend and collaborator Michael Palin in 2017.
Jeremy Hughes, chief executive of Alzheimer’s Society paid tribute, saying: “We
were lucky enough to work with Terry and his family when he joined us for our
London Memory Walk in 2017 and his support really helped inspire others to
unite against dementia. We are truly grateful for his aid in raising awareness
and much-needed funds.”
After huge
success with Python in the 1970s and early 80s, including the feature films
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, Jones
went on to work on a huge variety of projects. With Palin, he created the
successful TV series Ripping Yarns and forged a post-Python directorial career
with Personal Services, Erik the Viking and The Wind in the Willows. He made a
series of TV documentaries (specialising in medieval history), wrote nearly 20
children’s books, and contributed a string of comment pieces for the Guardian
and Observer denouncing the “war on terror”.
Palin said:
“He was far more than one of the funniest writer-performers of his generation,
he was the complete Renaissance comedian – writer, director, presenter,
historian, brilliant children’s author, and the warmest, most wonderful company
you could wish to have.”
Fellow
Python John Cleese said: “It feels strange that a man of so many talents and
such endless enthusiasm, should have faded so gently away,” adding: “Of his
many achievements, for me the greatest gift he gave us all was his direction of
Life of Brian. Perfection.”
Born in
Colwyn Bay, Wales, in 1942, Jones moved to England as a child, growing up in
Surrey. While at Oxford studying English literature, he met fellow student
Palin while performing in the Oxford Revue. After university, along with Palin,
Jones wrote and performed in a string of TV shows alongside other future stars
of British comedy – including Cleese, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie, Eric Idle,
Peter Cook and David Jason – on The Frost Report, Do Not Adjust Your Set and
The Complete and Utter History of Britain.
In 1969,
Palin and Jones joined Cambridge graduates Cleese and Graham Chapman – along
with Idle and animator Terry Gilliam – on a BBC comedy sketch show. Eventually
broadcast under the title Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it ran until 1974, with
Jones largely writing with Palin (complementing Cleese’s partnership with
Chapman). Seemingly chaotic, frequently surreal and formally daring, Monty
Python’s Flying Circus would became one of the most influential shows in BBC
history, revolutionising comedy formats, spawning scores of catchphrases, and
inspiring an entire generation of comedians. Jones’s fondness for female
impersonation was a key feature of the show, as was his erudite writing.
However,
Jones was becoming more interested in directing. He later told the Guardian:
“You not only act in the things – you’ve got to actually start directing the
things as well. When we were doing Python the TV show, I was a real pain in the
neck.” After the sketch-compilation feature And Now for Something Completely
Different (released in 1971 with the ultimate intention of breaking the show in
the US), the troupe embarked on an original film, Monty Python and the Holy
Grail, and Jones got his chance to direct, in conjunction with Gilliam. He was
very much signed up to Python’s democratic instinct: “If all six of us laughed
at something, then we all felt, ‘That’s OK, we can go ahead with that.’ And,
for me, it was just a question of getting that on the screen, getting that
moment of us sitting around the read-through, that moment where we all
laughed.”
Jones took
over the Pythons’ next film, The Life of Brian, as a solo director, with
Gilliam opting to concentrate on the film’s design. Backed by George Harrison’s
HandMade films and released in 1979, the religious satire proved a major
commercial hit as well as sparking global controversy. Jones made a memorable
screen contribution as Brian’s mother, squawking to the assembled worshippers:
“He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”
Jones then
directed the Python’s 1983 release, The Meaning of Life, on an even more
elaborate scale, stitching together sketches, musical numbers and complex
effects scenes. The film also contains arguably Jones’s most famous on-screen
character: the giant Mr Creosote, who explodes after a final “wafer-thin mint”.
With the
Python team agreeing to make no more feature films, Jones was free to branch
out. Personal Services, a comedy based on the real-life story of suburban
brothel-keeper Cynthia Payne was released in 1987. He followed this up in 1989
with Erik the Viking, which starred Tim Robbins as a reluctant pillager, and
was based on his own children’s book published in 1983.
As well as
Erik the Viking, Jones was able to indulge his own fervent interest in ancient
and medieval history in TV series, including Crusades (1995), Medieval Lives
(2004) and Barbarians (2006), which he presented with infectious enthusiasm. He
also published two books on Chaucer and created the kids’ TV cartoon Blazing
Dragons, which ran for two seasons from 1996-98 and told the history of
chivalry from the dragons’ point of view. Jones was also a prolific writer of
children’s books, including self-originated fairytales such as Nicobobinus.
Jones
became a vociferous opponent of the Iraq war, and published a collection of his
newspaper columns and other writings in the 2004 book Terry Jones’s War on the
War on Terror.
His final
directorial credit was the 2015 comedy Absolutely Anything, in which all four
surviving Python members participated, but it received an unenthusiastic
reception.
Jones was
married twice: between 1970 and 2012 to biochemist Alison Telfer, with whom he
had two children, and in 2012 to Anna Söderström, with whom he had one child.
 |
Terry Jones
obituary
Monty
Python star whose talents were highlighted in the show that revolutionised
British TV comedy
Stuart
Jeffries
Wed 22 Jan
2020 16.31 GMTLast modified on Wed 22 Jan 2020 19.38 GMT
One morning
Brian Cohen, completely naked, flung open the shutters at his bedroom window to
find a mob below hailing him as the Messiah. Mrs Cohen, played by Terry Jones,
who has died aged 77, had something to say about that. “He’s not the Messiah.
He’s a very naughty boy,” she told the disappointed crowd. It became a classic
cinema moment.
The 1979
film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a satire about an ordinary Jewish boy
mistaken for the Messiah, which Jones directed and co-wrote with his fellow
Pythons Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Michael
Palin, was banned by 39 British local authorities, and by Ireland and Norway.
Jones and his chums were unrepentant: they even launched a Swedish poster
campaign with the slogan: “So funny it was banned in Norway.”
As for
Jones’s performance as Mandy Cohen, it united two leading facets of the
funnyman’s repertoire: his fondness for female impersonation, and his passion
for historical revisionism. The latter was evident not just in his work for
Monty Python – in which his historian’s sensibility proved essential to the
satire of Arthurian England in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which he
co-directed and co-wrote – but also in several documentaries and books in which
he stood up for what he took to be the misrepresented Middle Ages.
“We think
of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and
superstition,” he said. “We think of it as all being about fair maidens in
castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these
things are wrong.”
Arguably,
without Jones, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-74) would not have
revolutionised British TV comedy. He was key in developing the show’s
distinctively trippy, stream-of-consciousness format, where each surreal set-up
(the Lumberjack Song, the upper-class twit of the year show, the dead parrot,
or the fish-slapping dance) flowed into the next, unpunctuated by punchlines.
For all his
directorial flair, though, Jones may well be best remembered for creating such
characters as Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, Cardinal Biggles of the Spanish
Inquisition, the Scottish poet Ewan McTeagle and the monstrous musician rodent
beater in the mouse organ sketch who hits specially tuned mice with mallets.
Thanks to
the show’s success, Jones was able to diversify into working as a writer, poet,
librettist, film director, comedian, actor and historian. “I’ve been very lucky
to have been able to act, write and direct and not have to choose just the one
thing,” he said.
Jones was a
second world war baby, born in Colwyn Bay, north Wales, and brought up by his
mother, Dilys (nee Newnes), and grandmother, while his father, Alick Jones, was
stationed with the RAF in India. He recalled meeting his father for the first
time when he returned from war service: “Through plumes of steam at the end of
the platform, he appeared – this lone figure in a forage cap and holding a kit
bag. He ran over and kissed my mum, then my brother, then bent down and picked
me up and planted one right on me. I’d only ever been kissed by the smooth lips
of a lady up until that point, so his bristly moustache was quite disturbing.”
When he was
four, the family moved to Surrey so his father could take up an appointment as
a bank clerk. Terry attended primary school in Esher and the Royal Grammar
school in Guildford. He studied English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and
developed a lifelong interest in medieval history as a result of reading
Chaucer.
At Oxford,
he started the Experimental Theatre Company with his friend and contemporary
Michael Rudman, performing everything from Brecht to cabaret. He also met Palin
and the historian Robert Hewson, and collaborated with them on a satire on the
death penalty called Hang Down Your Head and Die. It was set in a circus ring,
with Jones playing the condemned man. He and Palin then worked together on the
Oxford Revue, a satirical sketch show they performed at the 1964 Edinburgh
festival, where he met David Frost as well as Chapman, Idle and Cleese.
After
graduation, he was hired as a copywriter for Anglia Television and then taken
on as a script editor at the BBC, where he worked as joke writer for BBC2’s
Late Night Line-Up (1964-72). Jones and Palin became fixtures on the booming TV
satire scene, writing for, among other BBC shows, The Frost Report (1966-67)
and The Kathy Kirby Show (1964), as well as the ITV comedy sketch series Do Not
Adjust Your Set (1967-69).
In 1967, he
and Palin were invited to write and perform for Twice a Fortnight, a BBC sketch
show that provided a training ground not only for a third of the Pythons (Jones
and Palin), but two-thirds of the Goodies (Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie) and
the co-creator of the 1980s political sitcom Yes Minister, Jonathan Lynn.
Jones and
Palin wrote and starred in The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) for
LWT. Its conceit was to relate historical incidents as if TV had existed at the
time. In one sketch, Samuel Pepys was a chat show host; in another, a young
couple of ancient Britons looking for their first home were shown around the
brand-new Stonehenge. “It’s got character, charm – and a slab in the middle,”
said the estate agent.
In the same
year, he became one of the six founders of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They
expected the show to be quickly decommissioned by BBC bosses. “Every episode
we’d be there biting our nails hoping someone might find it funny. Right up
until the middle of the second series John Cleese’s mum was still sending him
job adverts for supermarket managers cut out from her local newspaper,” Jones
recalled. “It was only when they started receiving sackfuls of correspondence
from school kids saying they loved it that we knew we were saved.”
After
Python finished its run on TV, Jones went on to direct several films with the
troupe. The first, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was, he recalled, “a
disaster when we first showed it. The audiences would laugh for the first five
minutes and then silence, nothing. So we re-cut it. Then we’d show it in
different cities, saying, ‘We’re worried about our film, would you come and
look at it?’ And as a result people would come and they’d all be terribly
worried about it too, so it was a nightmare.”
He had more
fun co-writing and directing two series for the BBC called Ripping Yarns
(1976-79) in which Palin starred as a series of heroic characters in
mock-adventure stories, among them Across the Andes by Frog, and Roger of the
Raj, sending up interwar literature aimed at schoolboys.
Jones
directed and starred in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which some religious
groups denounced for supposedly mocking Christianity. Jones defended the film:
“It wasn’t about what Christ was saying, but about the people who followed him
– the ones who for the next 2,000 years would torture and kill each other
because they couldn’t agree on what he was saying about peace and love.”
In 1983 he
directed Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in which he made, perhaps, his
most disgusting appearance, as Mr Creosote, a ludicrously obese diner, who is
served dishes while vomiting repeatedly.
During this
decade Jones diversified, proving there was life after Python. In 1980, he
published Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, arguing that
the supposed paragon of Christian virtue could be demonstrated to be, if one
studied the battles Chaucer claimed he was involved in, a typical, perhaps even
vicious, mercenary. He also set out to overturn the idea of Richard II
presented in the work of Shakespeare “who paints him more like sort of a weak …
unmanly character”. Jones portrayed the king as a victim of spin: “There’s a
possibility that Richard was actually a popular king,” he said.
He wrote
children’s books, starting with The Saga of Erik the Viking (1983), which he
composed originally for his son, Bill. A book of rhymes, The Curse of the
Vampire’s Socks (1989), featured such characters as the Sewer Kangaroo and Moby
Duck.
In 1987, he
directed Personal Services, a film about the madam of a suburban brothel
catering for older men, starring Julie Walters. The story was inspired by the
experiences of the Streatham brothel-keeper Cynthia Payne. Jones proudly
related that three of four films banned in Ireland were directed by him – The
Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life and Personal Services.
Two years
later, he directed Erik the Viking, a film adaptation of his book, with Tim
Robbins in the title role of a young Norseman who declines to go into the
family line of raping and pillaging. In 1996, he adapted Kenneth Grahame’s Wind
in the Willows for the big screen, giving himself the role of Mr Toad, with
Ratty and Mole played by Idle and Steve Coogan. But it was rarely screened in
cinemas. “It was ruined by studio politicking between Disney and Columbia
Tristar,” he said. “We made a really nice film but no one saw it. It didn’t
make any money, even though it was well reviewed.”
Jones was
also unfortunate with his next film project. Absolutely Anything, based on a
script he wrote with the screenwriter Gavin Scott, concerned aliens coming to
Earth and giving one person absolute power. Plans were scuppered when a movie
with a similar premise, Bruce Almighty, starring Jim Carrey, was released in
2003. Only in 2015 did Jones manage to film Absolutely Anything, in which Simon
Pegg, playing a mild-mannered schoolteacher, is given miraculous powers by a
council of CGI aliens voiced by Jones and his former Monty Python colleagues.
Robin Williams, in one of his last roles, voiced Pegg’s dog.
Jones made
well-received history documentaries, including in 2002 The Hidden History of
Egypt, The Hidden History of Rome and The Hidden History of Sex & Love, in
which he examined the diets, hygiene, careers, sex lives and domestic
arrangements of the ancient world, often appearing in the films as an ancient
character, sometimes dressed as a woman.
In his book
Who Murdered Chaucer? (2003), he wondered if the poet had been killed on behalf
of King Henry IV for being politically troublesome.
He wrote
for the Guardian, about the poll tax, nuclear power and the ozone layer. He
became a vocal opponent of the Iraq war, and his articles on the subject were
collected under the title Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror (2004).
In his 2006
BBC series Barbarians, Jones sought to show that supposedly primitive Celts and
savage Goths were nothing of the kind and that the ancient Greeks and Persians
were neither as ineffectual nor as effete as the ancient Romans supposed. Best
of all, he sought to demonstrate that it was not the Vandals and other north
European tribes who destroyed Rome but Rome itself, thanks to the loss of its
African tax base.
When Jones
was asked what he would like on his tombstone, he did not want to be remembered
as a Python, perhaps surprisingly, but for his writing and historical work.
“Maybe a description of me as a writer of children’s books or maybe as the man
who restored Richard II’s reputation. I think those are my best bits.”
In 2016, it
was announced that Jones had been diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia, a
form of dementia that impairs the ability to communicate. He and his family and
friends spoke about his experiences to help others living with the condition.
Jones is
survived by his second wife, Anna (nee Söderström), whom he married in 2012,
and their daughter, Siri; and by Bill and Sally, the children of his first
marriage, to Alison Telfer, which ended in divorce.
• Terence
Graham Parry Jones, writer, actor and director, born 1 February 1942; died 21
January 2020
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Terry Jones
should be remembered for so much more than Monty Python
As the
comedy community bids farewell to Terry Jones, we should remember him for his
many talents – from history documentaries and directing feature films to
treatises on Chaucer
By Mark
Braxton
Wednesday,
22nd January 2020 at 4:41 pm
We knew
that Terry Jones had been ill with dementia, but his death on Monday at the age
of 77 still came as a shock to the entertainment world.
Floods of
tributes swamped social media, reflecting the affection he inspired through his
many and varied projects from the 1960s through to the noughties.
A driving
force behind the Monty Python ensemble – in their ground-breaking Flying Circus
TV series (1969–74), their envelope-pushing films and their adored stage shows
– Jones nevertheless developed other successful careers, in the fields of
history and children’s literature.
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Born in
Colwyn Bay in 1942, Terry Jones studied at Oxford, where he met Michael Palin,
and pre-Python he wrote for The Frost Report, Twice a Fortnight (a sketch show
with Palin, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie) and ITV children’s show Do Not Adjust
Your Set.
But it was
Monty Python’s Flying Circus that first endeared Jones to me and to many – with
his fearless capacity to inhabit any role that he was given, often by himself.
Jones was a leading light in a story John Cleese told me last year about the
Pythons first getting together – Oxford University’s Jones and Palin with
Cambridge alumni Cleese, Chapman and Idle (Carol Cleveland and animator Terry
Gilliam were soon added to the mix)…
“It was
nerve-racking at the start because after we’d had this extraordinary meeting
with [BBC comedy head] Michael Mills in which he gave us 13 programmes, we were
anxious for a bit because we had one or two meetings that got absolutely
nowhere – until dear old Terry Jones said, ‘Well let’s just go home and write.’
And then after a few days we had a read-through at Terry’s flat in Camberwell,
and we started laughing at what the others had written, what we each had
written. And that was a marvellous moment.”
An early
sketch that was a favourite of mine, and one that would get played to death on
my vinyl record of Monty Python, was Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, in which
Jones’s eponymous classical composer kept being sidetracked by Eric Idle’s
interviewer into revealing the reason for his unusual nickname.
Jones stood
out for taking on many of Python’s more extreme creations (see Mr Creosote in
the 1983 film The Meaning of Life), and by general consensus was the funniest
Python at playing women.
As Sir
Michael Palin told Radio Times last year, “There were certain sort of
caricature women that we had to play ourselves. Then there were women-women
that Carol played very well. But a lot of people would say, “Well why didn’t
you have women playing Terry’s mother?” Well, because Terry could play his
mother better than anybody! And that’s what a lot of Terry’s characters were
based upon.”
Terry’s
“Pepperpot” female character was a comedy staple of the 1970s, and his shrill
voice would ring out in playgrounds up and down the land, where Pythons were
like comedy gods and their characters were mimicked by young fans – many of
whom were probably too young to watch the post-watershed TV series.
The later
episodes of Flying Circus became more experimental, with longer-form sketches
that Palin says were a basis for Ripping Yarns, a comedy anthology series that
he wrote with Jones – a pilot programme called Tomkinson’s Schooldays aired in
early 1976 and two series followed in 1977 and ’79. Jones and Palin paired up
to write many Python sketches, so it was no surprise when they teamed up again.
The
mini-comedy films of Ripping Yarns were an absolute joy, spoofing the Boy’s Own
style of adventure stories in episodes that were set in a First World War
prison, India in 1914, 1930s Huddersfield and even 1920s Maidenhead (my home
town!).
Ripping
Yarns co-writers Michael Palin and Terry Jones as two of the masters at
Graybridge public school in the pilot episode, Tomkinson’s Schooldays
Jones
showed his gift for direction in the Monty Python films The Holy Grail (with
Gilliam), Life of Brian (in which the courageous Jones also appeared as a naked
hermit with only a long beard protecting his modesty) and The Meaning of Life.
He went on
to direct non-Python projects, too, from the Cynthia Payne-inspired comedy
Personal Services to The Wind in the Willows, in which he starred in full
green-face makeup as Toad.
Another
string to his bow was to prove hugely successful for Jones. He wrote many
stories on ancient and medieval history (Chaucer’s Knight, Medieval Lives,
Barbarians) and many for children (Fairy Tales, Nicobobinus, The Beast with a
Thousand Teeth and Fantastic Stories).
The last
book was adapted for Jackanory in 1993, when he told Radio Times, “They’re all
set very much in the world of the traditional fairy story, with ogres and
castles and talking beasts,” says Jones. “Whenever I write a new story I try it
out on my neighbours’ son, Tom, to see if it works. My own kids are both grown
up now, but I find Tom a very reliable critic.”
Jones
publicising Jackanory in RT in 1993. Surprisingly it was his first acquaintance
with the show
At the time
Jones revealed: “I loved reading as a kid. I was a great fan of Rupert the
Bear, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Then, at 14, I went straight
on to Ray Bradbury, which probably explains a lot.”
Another
domain that Jones dominated was history, and I loved the documentaries that he
fronted in the late 90s and early noughties. But where Michael Wood, for
example, would play it with a straight bat, Jones was always looking for a
comedy treatment, endearingly.
Previewing
his 2000 BBC Two documentary of ancient Rome, however, Jones told RT that truth
was stranger than fiction. “The history of gladiators has been blatantly lifted
from the scripts of Monty Python. For example, in Life of Brian we staged a
gladiatorial contest in which a feeble retiarius (or “net-man”) is faced by a
formidable gladiator. We thought it would be fun if the net-man simply took to
his heels and ran round and round the amphitheatre until the gladiator, weighed
down by his armour, ended up having a heart attack. Bit of theatre of the
absurd, or so we thought.
“However,
while filming Gladiators: the Brutal Truth, we discovered that almost nothing
we could dream up was too far from the truth. Occasionally Christians were
thrown to the lions only to find that the poor animals were in such a pathetic
state of health they didn’t have the strength to finish anyone off. They might
give the humans a terrible mauling, but they wouldn’t kill them. Christians
intent on martyrdom would grab the lions by their manes and stick their heads
in their mouths in order to force the creatures to do their duty.
“And that
would be just the day’s warm-up. No, really! Throwing convicts to unpleasant
deaths was strictly down-market entertainment – restricted to the warm-up
sessions. In Life of Brian we called it ‘the Children’s Matinee’. We thought we
were joking…”
But there
were so many facets to Jones. Before he was diagnosed with dementia in 2015, he
was still stretching himself, with a musical fantasy, more children’s books,
poetry, and literary essays. As he told Radio Times, “I’m proud and relieved
the Pythons have lasted so long. It enabled me to do a lot of academic stuff
because I didn’t need to earn money.”
The breadth
of Jones’s work is astonishing, and there was always something genial, friendly
and lovable about his TV persona, but comedy fans love the fact that he made
them laugh. “There are no taboo areas with humour, nothing you can’t make fun
of,” he once told RT. “The only criterion is: is it funny? If people laugh, it
is.”
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