INTERVIEW

“I WAS doing cabarets and revues together. about two I was desperate to get TV work years old after university. I’d sent hundreds when this of letters and was about to take a photo was position as a copywriter for Anglia taken on Television in Norwich when Frank the beach Muir got in touch and gave me a job at Colwyn in the BBC’s Light Entertainment Bay. To department in London, writing this day I can remember the continuity scripts for things like The frustration I felt at trying to build Billy Cotton Show for £20 a week. a sand castle with a wooden Mike and I started contributing spoon and not making more material to The Frost Report, which than a pile of sand. Eric Idle wrote for and John Cleese That must have been about was in, so we got to know each 1944 but we lived in Colwyn Bay other that way. We then met Terry until I was five and my memories Gilliam on Do Not Adjust Your Set of the place are very vivid. I can and John suggested we should all do recall my brother taking me to something together. That was how the field over the road to gather Monty Python began. mushrooms for breakfast. He told We had no idea that people would me that a bear lived in the brook still be talking about it 40 years at the end of it so I ran home and later – it’s far more famous now didn’t dare go back. I can also than it was then – and we truly remember the thrill of seeing a thought it wasn’t quite as funny as tank driving up the road with The Goon Show. All I can remember these enormous searchlights. is the terrible struggle with the That must have been for VE material. We were always going out day or VJ day. I was aware that on limbs and trying ideas that we there was a war on, primarily were unsure of and thinking, ‘Will because my dad was away people laugh at this?’ Or, ‘We’re serving with the RAF. He was going to be found out.’ posted to India soon after These days I’m a patron of Colwyn I was born and the first time Bay Theatre and, in between I remember meeting him was projects, I’m trying to help get them at Colwyn Bay railway station on the map. I have always felt very in 1946. All these people were Welsh, even though my mum was streaming off the train and my a Lancashire lass, and I go back to mother was in a great tizzy. my home town from time to time. Then, at the end of the Colwyn Bay is very different now that platform, there was a guy in it’s got a six-lane motorway going a forage cap with a kit bag. so I’ve had a slight aversion to chest that you put logs in. through it, but I’ll always hold fond He kissed my mum and brother that ever since. I quietened down a bit after that. memories of the place.” and then me. I’d never been Soon afterwards we moved to I went to grammar school in kissed by someone with a Claygate in Surrey and I hated it Guildford and then on to Oxford. Terry offers health information, moustache before – I was used to begin with. Then my parents I met Michael Palin quite early Monty Python style, at www. to being kissed by women – distracted me with this old brass on at university and we started myhealthtips.com. My favourite photograph by comedian Terry Jones Monty Python made the 70 year old a global star – but Wales is where X E R his heart is, as he tells Nick McGrath

S MAGAZINE # 15 APRIL 2012 55