Monty Python stars lead Terry Jones statue appeal

Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam are taking part in the campaign to raise £120,000 for a statue of Terry Jones in Colwyn Bay

Monty Python stars Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam have appeared in a north Wales town to raise funds for a statue of late member and "great friend" Terry Jones.

Palin and Gilliam are taking part in the 'Python on the prom' campaign to raise £120,000 for a statue of Jones in Colwyn Bay in Conwy county.

Jones, who died in January 2020, was born in the town before his family moved to Surrey.

Those behind the statue campaign hope it will help the regeneration of Colwyn Bay, and attract fans of the iconic comedy troupe from around the world.

Paying tribute to Jones, Palin said he had “wonderful ideas about life and how things should be done”.

“Terry was a real polymath, he could do a lot of things. When I first met him at Oxford, he was a very good actor, he was a very funny man, he played the guitar... he would have a go at absolutely everything,” he said.

"He was always very strong-willed and I think his Welshness gave him that feeling of being right. It was rather sad for Terry, aged five, to have to move to Esher in Surrey which is about as un-Welsh as anywhere you could imagine.

"He was a great, great friend."

Gilliam added: “Terry was a great romantic, always seemed to be looking for a new kind of holy grail and would invariably convince all of us to follow him in these quests.

“His dream of Wales always intrigued me. It was a very romantic dream, as if he was a kid taken away from this beautiful kingdom and dragged off to horrible England... but he always talked about Wales in these beautiful adjectives.”

Terry Jones was born in Colwyn Bay, before his family left when he was five

The campaign is being run by Jones' children, Sally and Bill Jones, in partnership with the Conwy Arts Trust, who have launched a GoFundMe campaign.

The bronze statue is being made by Llandudno-based sculptor Nick Elphick, and organisers say it will celebrate Jones as a “comedy genius” as well as his role as a “historian, writer and film director”.

Jones was born in Colwyn Bay in February 1942, and said he always felt “very Welsh” despite moving to Claygate in Surrey when he was five years old.

“I bitterly didn’t want to leave and hated being transported to the London suburbs,” he once said. “I always regretted that and was always saying ‘I’m Welsh’.”

His grandparents ran the local amateur operatic society, and staged concerts on Colwyn Bay’s pier each year.

Jones also met his father – a bank clerk – for the first time on the platform of Colwyn Bay railway station when he returned from India after serving with the RAF during the war.

In later life, Jones took a keen interest in the fortunes of his hometown's Victorian theatre, becoming its patron and officially re-opened Theatr Colwyn in 2011 after a £738,000 refurbishment.

As a Python member he made something of a speciality playing women, perhaps most famously as Brian’s quick-to-anger mother in the 1979 film of Life of Brian, which he also directed.

He is also well remembered for his appearance in The Meaning of Life as the exploding Mr Creosote who, after a gargantuan feast, misguidedly accepted “just one wafer thin mint”.

Actress Dame Emma Thompson supports the campaign in 'A Python on the prom' T-shirt

Like many of the Pythons, he later found it hard to fathom why the show gained such cult a following.

“The thing is we never thought Python was a success when it was actually happening – it was only with the benefit of hindsight,” he said.

After years of living with a rare form of dementia, Jones died in January 2020, aged 77.