Pleased with what he had written he then looked for a publisher, but had to wait three years before he came across one who was happy with what he had written and didn’t want to change things.

The enormous success of Monty Python has given Terry Jones the opportunity to do what he wants and follow his passions. ‘I’ve been lucky that Python has given me an income and I don’t spend an awful lot, so I could choose to do what I wanted to do. I’ve been able to do academic work and write things that don’t make money.

‘When we did the fourth series the BBC sold it to ABC Television and ABC butchered the series … they just absolutely took out the jokes ... they just mangled the thing. And so we took them to court in New York to stop them putting out the second show and in fact we failed.

‘And then, about a month later, after they’d put out the second show, our lawyer was going through the original contracts and – I’d totally forgotten – but in the original contracts I’d insisted on putting in a clause to the effect that … they couldn’t re-edit the shows once they’d been transmitted, and that had gone into the first contract and been repeated in all the other contracts with the BBC and nobody had noticed. We had the BBC over a barrel and in the end they gave us the rights to the shows. And, after 20 years, the Holy Grail came back to us and we got the rights to the Life of Brian again from another court case. So there’s enough money coming in to keep me going. Just need to buy wine – that’s all I need to buy!’

Of course, Monty Python has always been incredibly popular in America: ‘If you talk about Britain to Americans most of them say, “The Beatles and Monty Python”. I wish we’d earnt as much as the Beatles.’

One of Jones’s many reasons for writing a Quick Read is that he is convinced that he would be dyslexic if he’d been taught by the ‘look and say’ method, but, growing up in the late forties, he was taught phonetically and in fact he found English easy.

‘There was only one subject I was good at and that was English literature and composition. I really enjoyed that. So I never had any choice. Anna, my partner, is one of those cursed people who are good at anything they do so she never knows what she wants to do – until she found knitting.

‘I think reading is a magical thing. It’s something that you create in your own mind. It’s unlike a film which dictates everything that you’re seeing. With a book it feeds the imagination, you create the characters, you see the characters in your own mind.

‘It’s also the only thing where you’re in such close contact with the author. I remember going around with Douglas Adams – we’d written a book together. And I was so amazed ... doing the publicity for it, that people felt so close to Douglas. Of course, it’s because you have the author’s voice in your ear when you’re lying in bed at night … without anything else getting in the way.

‘When I’m reading Chaucer, who was writing 600 years ago, I feel I can hear his voice in my head … it’s like a tape recorder from the past. Chaucer writes so simply, without verbiage or extra words. He gives you just what you need.’

And it is the voice of Chaucer that has inspired Terry Jones to a life of eager research and discovery, ‘putting things right’, particularly about the Knight’s Tale. Terry believes that the portrait is ironic and that many historians have misread Chaucer’s account.

He talks about how many of the army King Edward II had in France 600 years ago should have been behind bars and that a lot of them didn’t want to stop fighting and go home, even when Edward decided to call a truce. The army stayed abroad ‘terrorising Europe and even holding the Pope to ransom’.

His love of medieval history stems from his belief that the past can teach us a lot about the present. ‘I don’t think people change basically. I see the same politicians in the fourteenth century. Like for instance Thomas Arundel who put Henry IV on the throne and put out a lot of spin about Richard II and made him into a tyrant which modern historians have swallowed totally.

‘Henry IV was like George W. Bush. He’s the son of a very powerful man, an easy-going bloke, just liked a nice life but he had Dick Cheney behind him [who] is exactly the same as Thomas Arundel ... the man who fixes everything and produces the propaganda, the spin – organises, pushes the guy into power.’

I ask him whether he would have liked to have been offered the role education secretary Michael Gove gave to Simon Schama, to look at how history is taught in schools. He pays tribute to Schama saying he’s a ‘good bloke and knows a lot more about history than me. But I’d have made it funnier’.

But his influence may be even more significant in a different learning environ- ment. I tell him that there are people in literacy classes who will read his book and it will transform their lives, like so many Quick Reads have over the past six years. People will hold Trouble on the Heath in their hands confident in the knowledge that words and books no longer intimidate them, because they have now read a book, completed and enjoyed it.

‘That feels very good. I suppose that’s why people write anything because you want to get a reaction. If you add to the pleasure of reading the actual pleasure of the pleasure of reading – now that’s the double whammy – that’s great.’

Ed Melia is NIACE’s Head of Media

Trouble on the Heath by Terry Jones is one of 10 new Quick Reads, priced £1.99: www.quickreads.org.uk

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Adults Learning is published 10 times a year (September to June) by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (England and Wales), supported by the Local Government Association.

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Volume 22, Number 7 March 2011

ISSN: 0955-2308