Terry Jones – a man who grasped the meaning of life

This is the story of the most extraordinary child who ever stuck his tongue out at the prime minister.

So begins Terry Jones’s favourite of his own children’s books. It goes on, “His name was Nicobobinus”, but it could have been Terry himself. And the only question should be: how might he himself like to be remembered?

The other Terry, Gilliam, sporting, to avoid confusion, an “I’m not dead yet” T-shirt on Graham Norton’s BBC chatshow on Friday night, spoke of “passionate, crazed, angry, happy, generous, sweet, kind … and yet somehow he’d just faded away … in the end I just think he’d just left. And forgot to take his body with him.”

His great friend Michael Palin attempted a (typically) modest tribute, which included the phrase “renaissance man” – which Jones would have bristled at – with kindness. Terry Jones disliked the term, arguing that “the medieval world wasn’t a time of stagnation or ignorance. A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world.”

A few years ago he said that he wanted to be remembered not for the Life of Brian or the Meaning of Life, or even the Pythons themselves, but as a children’s book writer and for his “academic stuff”, saying that “those are my best bits”.

He was a beloved amateur historian, in the best sense of the words – amateur has its roots in the word love – and did more than most professional scholars to change attitudes to the myth of the parfait gentle knight, refettling that through rereading as an ugly thug possessed only of a sword and wibbly “faith”. He also did wonders for the clever revisioning of Chaucer: see the recent great piece by Marion Turner on The Conversation website.

Turner, inter alia, comes out with the fine phrase “his own grail was knowledge”.

Jones once said that he was glad he had gone to Oxford, because if he had not, “I wouldn’t have met either Mike Palin or Geoffrey Chaucer – and without those two meetings the rest of my life would have been quite different.” Yet Jones is meshed more with Python than with Chaucer. He was always the least charismatic of the Pythons. Cleese was the haughty and tall; Idle the fast-smart; Chapman the handsome/tragic; Palin the assured dependable, who might surprise; Gilliam the crazed squid-monkey. But Terry Jones, despite being the glue that held the entire thing together … director, scripter of most of the best lines (“what … the curtains?”), angry and loving – such was his modesty he declined to have a blue plaque put up outside the house in Colwyn Bay, north Wales, where he was raised.

Three years ago he gave, along with Palin, an interview to our science editor, Robin McKie. McKie recalls, despite being a Rangers fan and thus not temperamentally beloved of any hint of sentiment, being “touched” by the experience: “I have to say. Palin was particularly sweet to him – you could sense there was a strong bond between them even if Jones could no longer articulate his feelings. [He was] living in the home – in Camberwell – where the Pythons wrote their early sketches, being tended to by people who had always loved him. So there is some uplift there.”

Palin, he told McKie, was a frequent visitor to Jones’s home. “The thing that struck me was how Terry reacted to his diagnosis [of dementia],” said Palin. “He was very matter-of-fact about it and would stop people in the street and tell them: ‘I’ve got dementia, you know. My frontal brain lobe has absconded.’

“He knew exactly what was affecting him and he wanted to share that knowledge – because that is the way that Terry is. His form of dementia may cause loss of inhibition, but Terry was never very inhibited in the first place.”

I had for a couple of years a column at the foot of the main comment page in this paper, through which I was allowed to share whims and prejudices. I count it as one of my proudest moments when I was told – “we’re going to have to find a sub for when you’re on holiday. Any objections to Terry Jones?” Um …

He used those columns to eviscerate the lurch to the Iraq war. “It took 200 years”, he once wrote, “for the crusaders to create Muslim fanaticism. It was the exact imitation of Christian intolerance.”

Terry J surely had and has a point. Terry G, older but not yet dead, and a loving friend to him, has taken an oblique stance. He occasionally lurches from the real world into twitterdom and has been … disliked, I’ll not put it more strongly … for venturing that humour cannot be patrolled by politics. His simple idea was that if something’s funny weird gloopy nasty – who among us have the right to define wit?

As the TV critic for the Observer I observe much which is not wit. Much of TV “humour” is clever boys and girls playing to themselves: occasionally, an absolute standout fireball gem. As a Radio 4 listener, I’ve stopped; the “humour” is so relentlessly, stultifyingly anti-Tory.

Terry Jones’s love was always a love of rough balance. Tolerance: even of stupidity. The Very Big Corporation Of America, a wonderfully stylised (by Jones) part of the Meaning of Life, features angry bohos in suits arguing how precisely much there was left of the globe to own. Item 6 is “the meaning of life”. And the answer comes: “1, people are not wearing enough hats. 2, matter is energy. In the universe, however, the soul does not exist ab initio as Orthodox Christianity teaches, it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation … flawed owing to man’s ability to be distracted by everyday trivia.”

In Nicobobinus, there’s this. “In fact, only his best friend, Rosie, knew he could, and nobody took any notice of anything Rosie said, because she was always having wild ideas anyway.”

There’s a strong suspicion that Jones was always more Rosie than Nicobobinus.

Or, as Terry queried urgently, in a bossy American accent, and for once in button-down Brooks Brothers tie rather than floral maudlin frumpery, at the end of The Very Big Corporation Of America, where every Python was of rigid-faceted visage, bedecked as Masters of the Universe: “What was that about hats again?”

Terry’s greatest moments

Mr Creosote

“Better,” says Mr Creosote, roiling into view at the start of the restaurant scene in The Meaning of Life. It answers John Cleese’s oleaginous waiter’s, “good afternoon m’sieur, and ’ow are we today?” But Jones swiftly amends it to “Better get a bucket, I’m going to throw up.”

Mandy Cohen

From Life of Brian comes this exchange between the “wise men” responsible for the worst case of mistaken identity in cinematic history, with Jones as Mandy Cohen, Brian’s mother.

Mandy: “So what star sign is he?”

Wise Man#2: “Hmm … Capricorn.”

Mandy: “Capricorn, eh? What are they like?”

WM2: “Like? Oh, but … He is the son of God! Our Messiah!”

WM1: “King of the Jews!”

Mandy: “And that’s Capricorn, is it?”

Sir Bedevere

Jones in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, has “established” that witches burn because they’re made of wood. And wood floats. And what also floats? (“Gravy! Very small rocks! Lead!” shout the villagers). No, a duck. If she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood. “And therefore …?” A witch! A witch!

That little … “and therefore” sums up Jones’s attitude to the usurping of logic for political/religious ends.

The Squire

Eric Idle, as the cravated, loathsome Arthur Nudge, is invading Jones’s space and enquiring of the “squire” – “I bet, I bet your wife’s been … around. Been around a bit, eh? Know what I mean?”

Jones: “Yes, I suppose she’s … travelled a bit. She’s from Purley.”

Arthur ‘Two Sheds’ Jackson

On the Pythons’ It’s the Arts show Jones is being interviewed by Idle, as “one of the foremost composers of our times”.

Jackson has somehow come by the sobriquet of “Two Sheds”

Idle: “I see, I see. And you’re thinking of buying this second shed to write in!”

Jones: “No, no. Look. This shed business – it doesn’t really matter. The sheds aren’t important. I wish you’d ask me about the music. … I’m going to get rid of the shed. I’m fed up with it!”

Idle: “Then you’ll be Arthur ‘No Sheds’ Jackson, eh?”