![]() ![]() He joined the university’s Experimental Theater Club, known as E.T.C., spurning the more organized Oxford University Drama Society. That was a good decision, he later reckoned otherwise “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.” He almost changed his mind when Cambridge, which had put him on a waiting list, also accepted him, but he stuck with Oxford despite being intrigued by Cambridge’s poetry program. He was accepted at Oxford and agreed to attend. “It was the surreality of the imagery and the speed of the comedy that I loved,” he wrote in the “Pythons” book, “the way they broke up the conventions of radio and played with the very nature of the medium.” A favorite among the radio offerings he listened to was “The Goon Show,” a comedy program that often veered into offbeat territory and had a cast that included Peter Sellers. When he was 5 the family moved to Claygate, in the London suburbs. He came and saw me when I was a week old, and was immediately posted to India. “I suppose they must have been guarding the grouse,” he wrote, “although he used to say later that they were testing out this newfangled stuff called RADAR. His father, Alick, was a banker by profession but was in the Royal Air Force at the time and stationed in Scotland. ![]() 1, 1942, “right bang slap in the middle of World War II,” as he put it in “The Pythons Autobiography,” a 2003 book by the troupe with Bob McCabe. Terence Graham Parry Jones was born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, on Feb. That ‘pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the O.E.D. Jones deadpanned to The New York Times in 2009, when the group had a rare reunion at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York. “The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves,” Mr. The popularity of the show soon made “pythonesque” an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. It led to “And Now for Something Completely Different,” a 1971 movie that was essentially a collection of skits from the TV show, and then several other feature films. The show worked a surreal brand of humor that was markedly different from most television fare. Their television sketch show, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” became a phenomenon, first in Britain and then in the United States when it was rebroadcast there in the mid-1970s. Jones, four other Britons - Michael Palin, Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapman - and an American, Terry Gilliam, formed Monty Python in 1969. Jones announced in 2016 that he had primary progressive aphasia, a neurological disease that impairs the ability to communicate. His ex-wife, Alison Telfer, confirmed the death. Terry Jones, who earned a spot in comedic lore as a member of the British troupe Monty Python and also had success as a director, screenwriter and author, died on Tuesday night at his home in the Highgate neighborhood of North London. ![]()
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