As their 65th birthday approaches, most British men are counting the days until they can retire. However, some people are still bouncing round trying to decide which metaphorical work "plate" to keep spinning.

At an age where it would not be unrealistic to expect someone to have a bit of a lie down and book a Saga holiday, I took the opportunity to have a little retrospective look at the career of Terry Jones - a career spanning 40 years - with the help of a man who has been around for most of it.

Can you describe a typical Jones/Palin writing session during the Python years?

First of all we had to decide where we were going to write. Terry lived one side of London and I lived the other, with Terry down in Camberwell and me up here [North London]. I think I tended to go down to Terry's in Camberwell so it would start either with a long bus ride, or later on I got a car and drove down there, and it was rather nice. I always seemed to enjoy going over the river, past Big Ben and the Thames and thinking "Hey, another writing day ahead…" and then we'd sort of sit there...

We'd always start with tea or coffee and talk about the day before, gossip a bit and then eventually, quite slowly and reluctantly, we'd get down to writing what we had to write. It depended on whether we were starting from scratch, which was something we used to usually do separately - we'd write a part and then get together, after three or four days - or if we had some stuff that we'd started actually writing together. We'd get the old script out and have a look at it and say what's good, what's bad, and Terry would say "I think it needs to go in this direction" and I'd say [hesitantly] "Oh yes, that's quite good…" Terry would sometimes have to persuade me, and sometimes I'd have to persuade Terry. Usually it got going when a few jokes were written down, and we'd got a few funny lines and a few funny ideas, and then we'd laugh a lot, and then we'd have lunch!

We were quite responsible as writers; we didn't take much time off. We did put in a full day but I think the result of that was that Terry and I wrote an awful lot of material for Python, probably far more than anybody else, but we wrote far more that was rejected. It balanced out at the end.

How did the working relationship change between Python and Ripping Yarns?

Well, it's interesting - the diaries that were published before Christmas give quite a lot of background to that - because the Ripping Yarns were sort of the BBC wanting to give me a show, for some reason, and I said well I don't want to do just a me show I want to do something with Terry. So we wrote the first Ripping Yarn together but once we both started acting in it and playing most of the roles it looked a bit of a watered down Python. I think eventually it was decided that I should perform in it, that we should write them together, and that terry would go off and do other things. So that's how the relationship changed. It became more of a writing relationship than a writing and performing relationship.

Were there any parts written by Terry that you can't help wishing you'd come up with?

[Laughs] Well, Mr Creosote was a great part. I thought it was such a brilliant sketch and so wonderfully done in the end. I thought it was terrific and that was pure Terry. It's something I'd like to have written myself. That, and all the stuff in Life of Brian where he's playing the hermit and [Brian] jumps on his toes - that sort of stuff. It's interesting because we sort of co-wrote that bit. I think I wrote the [idea for the] character of the hermit and Terry just created the hermit - the man who'd not said anything for all these years being forced to speak - and that was a very good touch. I quite admired that.

Post python are you surprised by Terry's move to History and Literature?

No, I'm not surprised entirely because Terry always had a very scholarly inclination. He did like books, and he very much liked the English or rather (I shouldn't say English as Terry wouldn't like that, being a bit Welsh!) the sort of British tradition of research and the academic side. He always liked that, and the very first thing we did together, which was called the Love Show in 1965, was a show about attitudes to sex throughout the ages and involved an awful lot of library work.

I think Terry really liked going to the British Museum and sitting in the library, getting down all of these dusty old books and finding the naughty bits. When he became so interested in Chaucer that he really wanted to go beyond a superficial view and actually find out a lot more about Chaucer's Knight, I thought yes, I could tell this was something that interested Terry. He seemed to find it so important that he'd actually rather do that sometimes than write another Two Ronnies series.

So, in the end this led through to the series' that he's done, and the documentaries, in the same way that I was always interested in Geography and I ended up as a travel documentarist. Terry was always interested in history, and especially literary history, and he ended up with all the history series he's done - but both of us trying to make popular something that we both took quite seriously.

Come on, is it about time he had a nice sit down and a cup of tea? Took the weight of his feet a bit?

[Laughs] Well, yes, we all should do that more often. Terry was always having cups of tea so as far as I know he still is!

I think Terry was always kind of driven by the opportunities that we have to work and create programmes, and we're all very lucky that there's an audience out there that says "We like what you do!" It's hard to turn your back on that audience, but I think there's got to be a sort of middle ground where you can have your cup of tea and your audience.

And finally, what are you working on at the moment? Do you have any more diaries lined up for publication?

In theory the second batch of diaries, which will be the 1980's, will be out in about 3 years time, around the end of 2009.

At the moment I'm halfway through work on a new series about travels through Europe, called New Europe, and that will be coming out in September but I've got a lot of filming and a lot of writing to do, so I'm sat here with my cup of tea, trying to work out the problems of Albania.

My feet are on the ground, I have to say, in more sense than one!

 

With big thanks to Michael Palin and Paul Bird.