Hello, I'm Christy Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1983, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

This week, our castaway is one-sixth of the Monte Python lot, one of the less tall ones.

He's a scriptwriter, a film director, a lyricist, a medievalist, a fishing personator.

It's Terry Jones. Terry, have you ever experienced loneliness in your life?

Well, I think that was a child. Although I wasn't lonely, I sort of had a very good family life,

really. I found isolation with something that I sought. I would sort of go in, hide upstairs,

and write poems. Were you an early child? No, I had a brother. I've got a brother.

Old or a younger? He's older than me, he has. But my family, I was very much, was trying to be on

my own, usually actually sitting in the garage when it was raining. That was a very important time.

I was just finding some small place in the house where I could get away from the television set or

whatever else was going on, and scribble little verses onto paper. You have a miserable alliance

of just eight records. Would that help on a Desert Island? Well, it's difficult to say.

Sitting here in the comfort of Lagam Place, I'm not sure, but it probably would, I think,

anything would help. Have you any musical skill yourself? Do you play an instrument?

Well, I have a guitar that I never really learnt to play it. You know what I mean? You've got

to that level of skill where you know that you're not really playing it. You have the chords.

That's right, and people say, oh, that's jolly good player, something else. You know you can't.

Right, now out of your eight records, what's the first one?

Well, the first record I've chosen is really the first record I remember actually seeing,

or hearing, or feeling, and it was an old 78. My brother bought it when he must have been

...