Farewell to the full Monty

Michael Palin mourns Terry Jones, his fellow Python, and tells Harry Mount about his own brush with the Grim Reaper

- Harry Mount

Michael Palin is still mourning his late fellow Python – and old university friend – Terry Jones.

Sir Michael – as he doesn’t ask to be called – saw Jones just before he died in January, suffering from dementia, aged 77.

‘He clearly was very unwell,’ says Palin. ‘But I talked to him as I always did. I wouldn’t accept the dementia had shut his understanding up. It had shut his communication up.’

And so Palin suggested to Alison, Jones’s first wife, who was by his side, that they should sing one of the songs he’d written with Jones, to get some reaction.

‘We sang Every Sperm Is Sacred from The Meaning of Life,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, we couldn’t remember all the words. So if Terry was hearing me at all then, he just heard what a complete shower we were.’

Jones was asleep at the time but he did have flashes of memory a year ago, when Palin read to him from a book they’d written together, Dr Fegg’s Encyclopedia of All World Knowledge.

‘Rather like when you listen to a piece of music you know, he immediately reacted and laughed at two or three points,’ says Palin. ‘I hadn’t heard him laugh for such a long time. The great thing was he laughed only at the bits he’d written. He’s truly defeated the dementia there.’

Palin, 76, first met Jones more than 50 years ago at Oxford, where Jones was in the year above him.

‘He was quite a charismatic figure – very dark and rather brooding,’ he says. ‘I was slightly in awe of him. I then found this dark, intense, brooding Welshman actually had a terrific sense of humour.