NOTHING was off-limits for the comedy of Terry Jones and the rest of the Monty Python team.
Race, sex, class, gender, national institutions and organised religion were all fair game for their anarchic brand of satire.
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Jones’s death on Tuesday night from dementia pushes that bold era further into the past.
So says Terry Gilliam, who co-directed Monty Python And The Holy Grail with Jones and lived not far from him in North London.
The American, as well-known for his surreal animations with Monty Python as his live-action movies, worked closely with Jones for many years. Both appeared as naked organists in sketches.
He affectionately called his old pal an “outrageously funny and generous and kind human being . . . and very often, a complete pain in the ass”.
Gilliam, 79, told The Sun how painful it was to see this energetic deep-thinker robbed of the ability to communicate by frontotemporal dementia. Visits to his friend became increasingly fraught.
He said: “Terry’s dementia was very sad. I got so depressed when I saw Terry because I was not sure he even recognised who I was.
‘It’s harder to get things through’
“We were old buddies and physically he looked great. He was a well-groomed shell.”
Worries over Jones’s health first emerged when he needed help remembering lines during the Pythons’ comeback shows at the O2 in London six years ago.
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Before then, Jones was a major creative force in the Python team.
He pushed ideas with fervour and would fight his corner if other members of the team weren’t keen on one of his sketches.
That man had gone long before Jones passed away.
Gilliam said: “Who Terry used to be was no longer inhabiting his body, as far as we could see.
“He was always argumentative (when healthy), just a pain in the ass. He was great. A wonderful, passionate human being."
Jones was a great raconteur who enjoyed good food and good wine.
Gilliam added: “Terry was totally consumed with life. One could never hope for a better friend.”
The director of boundary-pushing movies including Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas believes the Pythons’ brand of outrageous humour is now under threat.
He reckons the BBC is too “timid” these days to commission truly groundbreaking comedy.
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And Gilliam said it makes him “crazy” that in Britain, his home for half a century and where he is now a citizen, the right to laugh at almost anything is at risk.
No subject was off-limits for the comedy troupe when they first appeared on BBC2 in 1969.
They mercilessly lampooned the Establishment, exposed the hypocrisy of organised religion in comedy classic Life Of Brian and poked fun at death in one outrageous sketch in which an undertaker offered to eat the body of a recently deceased mum.
The team had battled censorship, in all sorts of forms, throughout their careers.
In 1976, the American network ABC cut scenes featuring the inoffensive phrase “naughty bits”.
Three years later, the blistering satire of Life Of Brian panicked some viewers who misunderstood its true target.
A handful of local councils even banned the movie, which they claimed was blasphemous.
'I came to this country 50 years ago because of the British sense of humour'
The BBC, meanwhile, told them to remove words from sketches including “condom”.
But Gilliam was never worried about creating offence.
He said: “We did probably irritate some people. We might have offended some people.
“But we made most people laugh, that was what is important.
“Laughter is so vital. When no one can speak honestly or are too frightened to put their foot in their mouth in any way, then we are in trouble.”
Gilliam added of the national broadcaster: “I think they are timid. It’s much harder to get things through now with so many layers. When Python was around, it was very simple.”
Worryingly, he believes censorship is more widespread now than it was back in the Seventies.
Gilliam said: “It is easier to get banned these days. It makes me crazy that it is under attack constantly — that people are not allowed to laugh at things.
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“One of the reasons I came to this country 50 years ago is that I just loved the British sense of humour. Brits were able to laugh at everything and anything and find humour in it, to find absurdity in it.
“We seem to be in a time which is so serious.”
The star, who arrived here in 1967, recently came under fire for daring to say he was tired of white people being blamed for everything. Commentators told him to grow up and he was condemned on Twitter.
Gilliam responded: “I do it, sometimes, to provoke. Sometimes I am just a naughty boy, as they say in Life Of Brian.
“A lot of people come forward and say, ‘It’s great, Terry — you said that because no one else is saying something like that’. At the same time, I am being pilloried.”
Gilliam clearly does not want to grow up. Throughout our interview, he giggles with mischief.
He self-deprecatingly calls himself an “old fart” who takes responsibility for his “many mistakes” and says his wife tells him: “I keep making the same film with different costumes.”
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But he is not scared to take risks and loves to confound the doubters. Time Bandits became the most successful British independent movie ever when it was released in 1981.
Brazil — Gilliam’s dystopian tale of an all-consuming bureaucracy — is considered a cult classic.
And Twelve Monkeys, a pitch-black fable about a world ravaged by a deadly illness, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, was a hit despite budget restrictions.
‘The plastic bits of me are doing very well’
Gilliam’s latest movie, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is finally nearing screens after an epic 30-year struggle.
Based loosely on Cervantes’ classic novel Don Quixote, its production was famously troubled, plagued by everything from flooded sets and legal cases to injuries to its stars.
Johnny Depp, John Hurt and Ewan McGregor were each attached at various points to the seemingly jinxed project.
Gilliam started shooting in 2000 with Depp but had to stop after just five days due to an unlikely series of disasters.
He recalled: “There were flash floods, Nato fighter bombers going overhead, my Quixote (French actor Jean Rochefort) falling ill and having to go back to Paris.” In the end, two of this year’s Best Actor Oscar nominees — Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce — took lead roles, to brilliant comic effect.
Gilliam does not believe actors should only be cast in roles matching their own ethnicity and sexuality.
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Pryce, a Welshman, plays Spanish knight Don Quixote.
The director said casting according to nationality “is just boring as far as I am concerned”.
He added: “We hire actors because they can play many things — other people, other races, other ethnic groups, other periods.
“Certain times, you need people of the same race or gender. But actors can play so many different kinds of people.”
Countless Python sketches feature its members dressed as women — roles that often fell to Jones.
After his death this week, fellow Python legend John Cleese joked on Twitter there were “two down, four to go” — referring to Eric Idle and Michael Palin as well as himself and Gilliam.
Thankfully, Gilliam is in good health — and plans to keep making movies. He said: “I have my hearing aids in, I have plastic lenses after getting my cataracts removed.
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