Terry Jones

Terry Jones co-directs 'Boom Bust Boom'

Monty Python star Terry Jones has co-written, co-directed and presents a documentary feature on economics called Boom Bust Boom, which includes a contribution from John Cusack.

Terry Jones to make Charlie Chaplin documentary

Monty Python legend Terry Jones is making a documentary about Charlie Chaplin. He will travel to Switzerland in the coming days to interview one of Chaplin's sons for the film, which he is making for TV.

Robin Williams appreciation

Monty Python's Terry Jones tells how the comedy perfectionist Robin Williams finally nailed the part of a talking dog in Jones's new film.

Monty Python Live review

John Cleese was hoarse, Terry Jones relied on cue-cards and at times they looked lost amid the spectacular. Yet you don't need to be a die-hard fan to take the view that none of that really mattered.

Monty Python, O2 Arena - comedy review

'John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam delivered material written nearly half a century ago - and it still works'

Terry Jones interview

The film director, poet, author and go-to Python for falsetto-voiced female roles explains why he's not even started thinking about Monty Python's O2 shows... yet.

Video: Simon Pegg and Terry Jones team up on film

Monty Python star Terry Jones has resurrected a script he discarded over 20 years ago and is now turning it into a film with an all star cast.

Monty Python interview

GQ talks to the iconoclasts who challenged the British establishment and ended up global comedy royalty. John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle discuss the glory years, blazing rows, groupies and the Knights Who Say Ni... Say no more!

A splendid job of skewering much of the white-man snobbery of what had gone before was done by the Python spin-off Ripping Yarns, which came a little later. And a very decent fist of that was made in Alexander Armstrong's Real Ripping Yarns, an unabashedly loving tribute to the programme itself - and also to the inspiration behind it all, the Boy's Own Paper. Armstrong was the perfect presenter: and he, and Michael Palin and Terry Jones, showed, with nuance, that dreadful love-hate relationship between public-school lunacy, as evinced in the BOP and so successfully spoofed in Yarns, and the common good-humoured decency of the male race, as demonstrated by all three men. There was a certain wistfulness in Armstrong's tone as he read from RM Ballantyne: "Boys ought never to decline to climb a tree to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of them falling off and breaking their necks." A rewatchable delight.

Alexander Armstrong's Real Ripping Yarns (BBC Four), an exploration of the literature - boys' books and magazines, Boy's Own Paper etc - that inspired Michael Palin and Terry Jones's post-Python television project. By the amiable actor, comedian and presenter now inextricably linked with the word Pointless (I actually hear that sound - the frantic tinkly synthetic pizzicato ascending scale as the red bars disappear from 100 to zero - whenever I see his face).

It's a world of healthy outdoor living, risk-taking, British pluck, colonial heroes and derring-do; one in which hobbies were encouraged but onanism was a big no-nonanism (it leads to sickness, both physical and mental, of course). Most things could be sorted out by a good thrashing or an ice-cold bath.

What's nice about the programme is that as well as quite rightly ridiculing the BOP and the rest, AA is clearly also rather fond of them. It's celebratory too then, affectionate even. And so, in keeping with the original Ripping Yarns of Palin and Jones, who both feature here, basically everyone's tossing everyone else off, or would be if it wasn't such a sin.