An Oxford graduate, Terry Jones, who has just died at the age of 77 of a rare form of dementia, was not only a leading scholar of the English medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. He had also committed several historical documentaries for the BBC devoted, inter alia, to the Crusades or ancient Rome. Not to mention this fictional feature film inspired by the destiny of a brothel keeper in London. Or the scenario of a puppet movie in which David Bowie wore a wig made of sprigs of sauerkraut. As for the Monty Python Flying Circus, which Terry Jones founded, with four other British and an American, a little over fifty years ago, his influence on contemporary comedy is comparable to that which the Beatles exercised on contemporary music. The 45 television episodes and five feature films of the comic group (including two directed by the one Terry Jones) remain after the most beautiful title of glory of this singular talent.
Terrence Graham Parry Jones was born on 1st February 1942 – "Exactly in the middle of the second world war", he liked to point out – at Colwyn Bay in North Wales. A banker by profession, his father was mobilized and sent to India after the Allied victory. Young Terry did not know him until he was four years old. In the meantime, the family has moved to a London suburb where the boy studies well enough to be admitted to Oxford. First enrolled in literature, he turns to history out of love for Chaucer until the day when, working in the library, he realizes that he finds much more interest in his activities within the Experimental Theater Group, where he met a fellow student by the name of Michael Palin, who was studying. The young people grew up listening to The Goon Show, the radio show by Spike Milligan that made Peter Sellers, and are influenced by the group Beyond the Fringe, founded by Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.
Meanwhile, in Cambridge, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle neglected their studies to cultivate their comic talents within the Footlights troupe. These two factions moved to London in the early 1960s and found work on television. With Palin, Terry Jones writes and plays for presenter David Frost's variety show, then for a children's series called Do Not Adjust Your Set (do not touch your position) which employs, in addition to Eric Idle, an American immigrant in charge of animated sequences, Terry Gilliam.
