The job I was doing this week had a green room. That may be normal, I have barely any experience of television, so I don't know, but I had the time of my life in this green room. It reminded me a bit of the green room of the old London Dungeon. I was much more of a stranger to this one of course, but that's not what it felt like. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, maybe all green rooms are basically the same. I doubt it though. I suspect I was very lucky, particularly to have been here, doing this on the day that Terry Jones died... I didn't want to be Terry Jones when I grew up. I wanted to be him immediately, the moment I found out a Python was also writing fairy tales. Not to mention Bert Fegg, Labyrinth, Eric the Viking, Medieval Lives. There seemed to be nothing this adult was doing that a child couldn't at least attempt. So I spent my childhood making silly jokes and silly books, and putting on silly shows and silly voices, and trying to write strange new fairy tales, and correcting people and... Let me just check... Nope, yep, that's still the plan. So that's what I was lucky enough to be doing when he died on Wednesday. Sharing a ride on the deathless ripples of his pebble. Enjoying the deepest, kindest course of Terry Jones' timeline.
No Terry Jones, no "King Isãbard & Co. of: Theotropolis". He's that important!
Oh, and I've just remembered, in 2001 I sent him one of my books (not the one above), and he replied with two hundred pounds to help take a show based on it to Edinburgh! (Here's the only evidence I could still find of it online; the other reviews were all four stars though, I swear.) And here's an excellent article by Eddie Robson on exactly how important Jones was to Python, track-keepers! And here, finally, is a photo of Michael Palin codedly confirming it:
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