Michael Palin : That's how I met Terry Jones, who was quite a well-known Oxford figure. He used to have an amazing dark-brown, hairy check coat, I remember, and he was tanned and dark, not pink-cheeked like I was. He had his own set-up at Teddy Hall, was much involved in the ETC plays that Michael Rudman did, and Brecht, the big thing then. Terry was definitely in the senior league.

Terry Jones was born, Aquarius like me, on the 1st February 1942, in the North Wales resort of Colwyn Bay. His father was Welsh and his mother came from the Lancashire town of Bolton. Terry and his elder brother, Nigel, watched their father waste his carpentry talents doing a menial bank clerk job. Terry noted that his father only really started living when he retired and was free to pursue what he wished. During his years at the bank, Terry's father served with the RAF in WWII and went to India. When he returned, the Jones family moved to Claygate in Surrey. A move which Terry hated. He resented leaving behind Wales, the beaches, cliffs and parks, and he made a point of being as welsh as possible for the next fifteen years.

Terry first calling, when he was five, was to be a poet and he recalls the first poem he wrote called "Prairie Fires". He also thought he might like to be a composer, but that lasted all of three days. He subsequently enrolled at the Royal Grammar School in Guildford, where he earned the captaincy of the rugby 1st XV. Terry was a good student, working hard, handing in essays on time, just being a general 'swot'. The thing that he disliked about this time was the inability to perform due to the headmaster and his views on the ethics of acting. "The headmaster thought that actors were by definition homosexuals."

While doing his homework, he would listen to The Goon Show, and prior to that, ITMA, which shaped his outlook on life and his appreciation of all things silly. He would watch Danny Kaye at the cinema and think that was what he wanted to do for a living.

Terry excelled at English but had a strong dislike for maths and sciences and he nearly failed his A-levels due to a misreading of the set questions. He spent an extra year in the sixth form, during which time he applied to Cambridge to be interviewed by Gonville and Caius college, where he was described as a mixture of "simplicity and sophistication" and invited to take the entrance examination. He also took the exam for St. Edmund Hall at Oxford, a place he didn't really want to go to. Oxford offered him a place studying English, and he took it, just days before Cambridge would reply and invite him to join them. He ponders if he'd joined Cambridge whether he would've gotten involved in the imposing and slightly scary Footlights side of things..

Whilst at Oxford, he met Michael Palin, a year below him, and the two began writing together. After University, Terry got bored of Oxford and decided to find a job. He ended up working as a copywriter for Anglia Television before he got a call from Frank Muir's secretary asking him to come and work in the Light Entertainment department. It was here that he first sat in on the Frost Report.

During his time behind the scenes at the BBC he met his future wife Alison, a technician in the Botany department of the University of London. They married in 1970 and bought a three storey house in Grove Park, on the heights south of Camberwell....