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Jeremy
Novick tries to get some sense out of ex-Monty
Python star, turned author and journalist Terry Jones.
 Anyway.
I'm talking to Terry Jones about the show he's putting
on during the Brighton Festival with the fantasy author
Terry Pratchett. So Terry. Tell me about this thing you're
doing with Terry Pratchett.
"I've no idea."
What do you mean? You are doing something with Terry Pratchett?
"No. It just says in the diary do a thing with Terry
Pratchett. I have no idea what it is."
Uh huh.
"It's The Two Terrys or something. I have no idea."
Are you friends or something?
"No, no. I'm an admirer of Terry Pratchett's, but
we've never met."
So is this going to be one of those 'Unplanned' gigs?
Um… well I don't know. You've started making me think
about it now. I mean, I haven't thought about it up till
now. Maybe I should talk to Terry about what we're going
to do."
I'm not sure I entirely believe you.
"Nnnnnnn. They contacted me about six months ago
and… well…"
Are you familiar with his work?
"Well yes. I know Terry Gilliam's been working for
about a year or so on a script of his…"
So you're just going to sit down and have a little chat
together?
"Well… I don't know. You've got me all worried
now. They called me. I thought they knew what we were
going to do."
Maybe they did know. It depends who they are I guess.
"Well I don't really know. But I'm sure we'll have
fun. I'm sure it will be a jolly evening."
For
anyone of a certain age - a reciting-Monty-Python-sketches-in-the-playground-the-morning-after-the-show-went-out
kind of age - it's curiously strange to conjure up a picture
of Terry Jones as Terry Jones. Mostly he appears in drag
- what they used to call a 'Pepperpot' - screeching some
Pythonesque inanity.
In
person he's as far from that image as you could get. Shy
and reserved, he comes across as not so much frail as
fragile. There's something childlike about him. It feels
almost rude asking him questions, like you're bullying
him, just like when you ask a child to explain themselves
and they say "dunno" or "didn't" and
you want to press them but feel you can't. But he's also
very sweet and has a strange but endearing habit of starting
a sentence or an audible thought (often they're similar
things) with a high pitched "Nnnnnnn".
"I
don't really do things like this," he says to me
- unnecessarily. "I only usually do things where
I have to do some publicity, like if I've got a book out.
We're putting out a DVD of The Holy Grail and I've been
working on that. It's rather good actually. There's a
documentary that Mike (Palin) and I made wandering around
the locations and there are subtitles in French, subtitles
in German and a set of subtitles for people who don't
like the film. There's also the Lego version of the Knights
Of The Round Table."
It's
a surprise how quickly Jones brought up the P word. I
had thought that he'd be bored to death of being asked
questions about something that happened so long ago. Maybe
he tries to get it in before anyone else can. Maybe he
uses it as something to hide behind. Maybe - and more
likely - he doesn't really think about it that much.
Terry Jones is one of the Pythons. It doesn't matter that,
bar the odd reunion, Monty Python stopped functioning
a quarter of a century ago, the six Pythons will always
be Pythons. Individually and collectively, there's never
been a group of comedic artists who've created so much,
who've been so influential as The Pythons. You can argue
for The Goons, and sure, if there hadn't been The Goons
there wouldn't have been Python. There are other precedents
- the Beyond The Fringe team - but the ripples from the
Python pebble are the ones that spread.
For
a man who's done so much work outside the Pythons - he's
written books, he's directed films, he's a scholar…
is there a sense of frustration that I'm not going to
ask about his last book, The Lady And The Squire, even
though it was shortlisted for the Whitbread children's
award? Does he care that I'm not really that interested
in his new book project Who Murdered Chaucer? even though
he's a Chaucer fanatic, even though medieval history and
especially Chaucer is his passion? How frustrating is
it that we're more interested in what his favourite Monty
Python sketch is? "It's different things, really.
Holy Grail I liked, I like the atmosphere. I think Life
of Brian was the best conceived thing, the best story.
It works as a film. The Meaning Of Life I think has some
of the best things we ever did in it, the best individual
items. The whole idea of Python was to do something that
was totally unpredictable - that eschewed style, the idea
really was that we wouldn't have a style that was recognisable
- and it's a mark of our complete failure, the fact that
Pythonic is now down in the Oxford English Dictionary,
as a definition of a style."
Does
Python follow you around like an old lover you can't quite
shake off? Every time you talk to someone like me - or
do something like the Terry Pratchett night - it can only
ever be a question of time before the Python question
comes up. Is there a side of you that dreads that? "No,
it doesn't make much difference to me really. It's all
part of what I am. I don't mind if you want to talk about
that or my books or whatever else it is that I'm doing."
But the proportion of people who are interested in you
as opposed to you as a Python, it must be quite small.
The question of the individual against the collective.
"Nnnnnn. It was the individuals that made the collective
so… I don't think so."
Jones is still best friends with Michael Palin - they
were at Oxford together and had a writing partnership
long before the Pythons - and after it finished. Could
the Pythons ever get back together again? "Ever?
I don't know about ever, but when we last tried writing
together we weren't coming from the same direction, it
had all changed really. What we used to do when we first
started writing, we would sit in the same room and write
but by the time it came to doing Python we were writing
individually and then we'd read out what we'd got and
swap stuff. All the Python stuff we wrote like that. I'm
not sure we could - or would want to - do things like
that again. Also, the same group of people will never
be there." (He's referring to the death of Graham
Chapman, the maverick spirit of the group.)
Do
you enjoy going back? Is there a sense of re-living the
past?
"It's a bit weird sometimes. I think the weirdest
thing was recently when we did a stereo overdub of some
shows that we did in mono and you find yourself going
back over things you did a quarter of a century ago. That's
a bit strange."
Does it turn you into the people you were then?
"Well I guess we still are those people really."
I'd have thought in 25 years you'd have changed a fair
bit.
"Only the molecules."
Terry. One last question. What's your favourite sketch?
"Nnnnnnn, I'd say the fish slapping dance. Or I might
say The Spanish Inquisition. It's really, really funny
but there's no perceptible rationale behind it, or no
perceptible comic analysis - to me that's the most wonderful
thing, when you can get comedy that is incapable of analysis
and that's a kind of magical quality. Robert Browning
said of poetry that a metaphor was when you take two ideas
and you combine them and produce not a third idea but
a star. I always think the same is true of comedy and
you take two ideas and produce not a star but a laugh."
Terry
Jones is appearing with Terry Pratchett at the Concert
Hall, Brighton Dome on May 22 at 8pm. Tickets £7from
01273 709709.
The
Life Of Michael, a biography of Michael Palin (Hodder
Headline) by Jeremy Novick is out now.
copyright New Insight 2002
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