Lower level, Laverne, here, we're taking our usual summer break, so until we're back on air, we're showcasing a few programs from our back catalogue. As usual, the music's been shortened for right reasons. This week's guest is Monty Python comic Terry Jones. He was cast away by Roy Plomley in 1983.

BBC Sound, Music, radio, podcasts. This week, our castaway is one sixth of the Monty Python, not one of the less tall ones. He's a scriptwriter, a film director, a lyricist, a medievalist, a fish impersonator. It's Terry Jones, Terry. Have you ever experienced loneliness in your life?

Well, I think I was a child and I wasn't lonely. I sort of had a very good family life, really. I found isolation was something that I thought would sort of go away and hide upstairs and write poems.

Were you an only child? No, I had a brother. I've got a brother, older or younger. He's older than me.

Yes, but I found I was very much was trying to be on my own and usually actually sitting in the garage when it was raining those very important time or just finding some small place in the house so I could get away from the television set or whatever else was going on and sort of scribble little verses on the paper.

You have a miserable illanes of just eight records. Would that help on a desert island?

Well, it's difficult to say, you know, sitting here in the comfort of lagom place. I'm not sure, but it probably would I think anything would help.

Have you any musical skill yourself to play an instrument?

Well, I have a guitar, but I never really learned to play it, you know? I mean, like, 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. Yes. And people say, oh, that's a jolly good play or something else.

You know, you can't right now out of your eight record. What's the first one?

Well, the first record I've chosen is really the first record I ever remember actually seeing or hearing or feeling. And it's an old 78. My brother bought it when he must have been five and I must have been three. And we were living in Colwyn Bay. And so this was not 1945, I guess. And this record is Bicycle Tony Pastor. And it's called Five Salted Peanuts. To me.

It sort of recaptures those sort of days just after the war, I guess. And it's sort of it's very much GeoEye music. And it's just got an atmosphere that says Coinbase made me, although I won't say it to anyone else, I put all my pennies, but I don't never will.

It's probably not done. You know how to count. I always get the same amount.

I bought a lot, but all I got was five oh oh oh five salted peanuts.

I mean, I had a lot of impact on it. Tony Pasteur and his orchestra. Oh, right now, Terry, you belong to the great Welsh family, Joan Colwyn Bay, where they used to be a very good repertory company. I don't know if this still is where next to do stand. Colwin before long?

No, to my great regret as a child, we moved when I was about four and a half or five years old. We moved down to Claygate, which is near each in the home counties. Yeah, sort of stockbroker belt. And I spent the next 15, 20 years of my life sort of literally saying I'm not English, I'm Welsh, you know, take me back to my home, please, everybody.

Have you got the language?

No, unfortunately not. I mean, this is awful things that I'm just saddled with this terrible home counties accent. And, you know, I am feeling Celtic and wanting to be Welsh.

And sadly, you're beginning to sound very well. You went to Guildford Royal Grammar School. Was there a kind of Welsh colony there?

Not that I ever discovered. That may have been one of the floorboards somewhere, but I never actually managed to lose them.

What were you best at? You must have been a scrumhalf. Actually, I was looking forward. I should have been a scrumhalf. And I played wing forwardness at the time.

What did you want to be as a boy? Well, ever since I could write, really, I was going to be a poet, I guess I was always writing poems and scribbling verses on the bits of paper.

Were you encouraged with the somebody who saw the the spark in your eye?

I don't know. Actually, I remember at primary school people coming along and saying, oh, isn't it wonderful? You know, he's using self-expression. It's so good to see this. And I wasn't doing self-expression. I was writing poems about cowboys and trains, going through tunnels and everything. To me, it was just sort of making things like making chairs. It wasn't self-expression, but I suppose I must have been encouraged, although I can't really remember it.

Did music come into your life at that time? Only in the form of Tony Pasteur and his orchestra? Yes. Yes, we that it was going to be my second record. But you said I couldn't have the same record twice.

No, no, no, no. Because you can play it as often as you like. All right. Let's have a completely different record as your second.

Well, I thought if I had sort of landed in this desert, it's probably pretty traumatic. I should imagine me and I should think and I thought I'd need a piece of music that would kind of reassure me about the world and that things were going to be all right. So I chose five salted peanuts by Tony Pasta, but I know we can't have that one again.

So instead, I've substituted Mozart's serenade for 13 wind instruments, particularly the third movement, which I don't know any piece of music that speaks more to my soul than this piece of music just makes me cry.

The third movement of the Mozart Serenade, number 10 and B flat for 13 wind instruments, the London Wind Quintet and ensemble conducted by Otto Klemperer.

Now from Gilford, you went up to Oxford to Sir Edmund Hall.

What did you read? I read English. It's the nearest thing to not reading anything, really.

And what were your other activities?

Well, when I was there, I, I designed ISIS, which was the magazine of the university, but basically I got into acting and into the theatre side.

And what entertainment did you take part in?

Well, we put on the basically in Edinburgh, the experimental theatre club would go up with a play every year and a review. And I eventually ended up in the reviews. I started actually acting in Turgenev for the first thing and breath I think it was.

Yes. Well, the Oxford University Experimental Theatre Group came into the West End, I'm sure you'll remember, in a piece called Hang Down Your Head and Die. Well, that's right. Yes. You were the one who died. That's right. Yes. A bit unfair, I thought. But the production didn't the production didn't. That production went on for about six weeks, actually, at the comedy theatre. It was in the vacation before my finals, in fact.

So I was sort of sitting studying in a bedsit in court and then performing in the evenings.

You then appeared in a review, the title of which was for asterisks within quotation marks, actually, yes.

Actually, that was the year before. The year before. I'm sorry. I've got my things occasionally much wider.

So you'd move from four Asterix up to more serious drama. Yes.

What is he having done for the Phoenix Theatre? Two weeks. I mean, it was absolute disaster. May say that was at the same time that Cambridge Circus were doing their review with John Cleese. And er so that was the first time I saw John Cleese.

Did you meet at that time? I think we did actually. I think John took me out for steak and tried to con some material out of me. One of our. Did you write some of the material?

Well, I wrote a little bit of the metalious in the form asterisks, which we called.

That's very tactful. And other people could not do good.

They said at this time, were you resolved to make a living in the entertainment business?

It happened kind of by default more than anything, having always decided I was going to be a poet or I have to say an actor, I gave the same thing. It's not, is it?

Now I know what I saw Danny Casey when I was quite young and I thought, well, anybody can do that.

And that's the life for me. But it was parody I was interested in. But I saw the economic disadvantages of this cause.

So I suppose I thought, well, I'd become an academic, but sort of three years at Oxford slightly cured me of that.

It was actually sitting in the Bodleian Library reading what somebody had written about what somebody else had written, about what somebody else had written, about what Milton had written.

And I looked around all these other people who were reading what somebody else had written about what somebody else had written, about what somebody else had written, about what Milton or somebody else had written.

And it seemed remote. It seemed like I would rather be writing the thing in the first place. And then after the Edinburgh Review that year, when I came down, we were offered to do a run at the establishment club in London, and it seemed like kind of a natural progression. So I kind of fell into it.

Well, that's a watershed in your life.

So let's have record number three.

Well, I'm very fond of stories, Roy. I do like a good story and I thought I ought to have one. And so this is by Dr Hook and it's written by one, I think one of the best songwriters alive, a chap called Shel Silverstein. And it's the story of the wonderful soup stone.

I swear you could taste the chicken and the made and the new rose and the marrow bones, but it really wasn't nothing but some water and potatoes and one.

Oh, wonderful. Oh, soupçon. Hanging from a string in my mama's kitchen back in Hollywood today, the story of the wonderful soapstone by Dr. Hook.

Terry, like so many clean living young Britons, when you came down from Oxford, you decided to join the BBC. That's pretty strong, actually, right?

I tried to join the BBC when I was at Oxford, but didn't have much luck.

I then spent a year writing a thing called The Sex Show.

I think it was called Oh, no, no, it's called The Love Show. It was about sex. That's why I did that.

Go on anyway. Now, it didn't. No, not even with asterisks. No, no, not at all. It was overtaken by the sexual revolution. Really? Mm hmm.

And then after about a year, I decided I really ought to get a job.

And strangely enough, Frank Muir suddenly offered me a job as a script editor with the BBC TV. What sort of shows?

Well, I don't know. See, I went along this evening and he said, well, you know, would you like to come and work here?

You could have an office. And so I had an office and two desks and two typewriters and four telephones and and that fountain playing in the maths rideshares, constantly going to the lavatory.

And I wasn't quite sure what I was meant to be doing, except Frank said, well, you come and see what's happening in the BBC, get an idea about what's going on and write a few things, read a few scripts as they come in.

And so it's wonderful.

I had this sort of six months introduction to the BBC and you did a little light work on late night lineup, I believe.

Yes, that was later, actually. I did a director's course. Then I became a production assistant for which I was totally unqualified and was quite rightly given the elbow as such.

And late night lineup succored me at this point and gave me a job as a sort of resident loony there. So Mike Pailin, I started working together, doing a few little bell.

And he'd been at Oxford with you, hadn't you?

Well, he was a below me. We hadn't worked together except on hang down your head and die. But you'd still speak to him.

I would still, yes. We're quite good friends. And you began to write for comics? That's right.

Yes. We wrote for I think the first joke we ever wrote was for Bill Cotton, the Bill Cotton Banjo. And I think it was Ross Conway saying he'd just been on holiday. And Bill Cotton says, oh, yes, Costa Brava. And Ross said, no cost a fiver.

And that was the kind of response it got at the time to react to that immediately, I was just thinking it out.

It was a complicated one, you know, very good. Do you remember any other colleagues before?

Well, yes, there were actually the next GOP vote was for Ken Dodd, actually.

Hmm. Which was quoted as kind of joke of the year on the, uh, the newsreel roundup.

Unfortunate.

It's the visuals I can't show you. Well, I could show you. I will say this is a good guess. It was the policeman's walking.

Mazess That we had all these policemen, white setit all lined up on their marks, on your marks, get set, go. And then all of the walk like that, you know, come back.

Didn't it come over on the radio? Well, it didn't come over really well at the time.

It seemed very well. Despite all this, you were promoted really to strip Ed, having sort of written for comics, which meant that having been a writer, you were not permitted to mess about the writings of other people.

Well, no, it was really the other way. I mean, from script editing, really into writing, we started writing for The Frost Report really in earnest. And eventually Jimmy Gilbert, who was then directing the first reports, allowed us to come and take part in them as well, because we weren't making that much money. We were getting I think it was seven pounds a minute for what we wrote, seven pounds a minute.

Well, that's not five minutes worth of writing you a 40 hour week.

What we know is a minute of what went on newsis and we'd spend 40 hours writing.

And then if we were lucky, we get two minutes worth on the first report, which meant seven pounds each for Mike and me and our growing families.

Now, you decided to write for yourself, do not adjust. Your set is at this stage.

We began to feel that in writing for other people like to run is Marty Feldman we're writing for then you're dropping names now?

I am.

Well, it was you know, the jokes went down so well, I thought I better cover up.

You know, we'd write these scripts and they were getting on, but they weren't quite what we'd written when when they were actually done in the comics were messing about with them. Well, I'll tell you what happens. What happens is you've got home. You might write a nice little script. You give it in to the producer. He reads it and laughs and the comic then reads it. And then they all laugh and the script table and then they start rehearsing it.

And after about a five days rehearsal, nobody's laughing anymore. So people start inventing other things to make it funny again. And it works out. That's right. Yeah.

So the whole thing just suddenly evaporates. Yeah.

So we began to feel we'd like to do our own thing a bit, you know. Well you did that.

Do not adjust your set. They knew that another series for London weekend, you got sort of a bit hyped with the BBC.

Well, no, it was just we Mike and I had got this idea for doing this history series, which was eventually called complete and utter history. And it was just happened that, again, Frank Muir offered us to do a series. So and we grasp it with both hands.

He had moved over to London where he had. Yes. So it's one of the very first shows that London weekend did. It was done in black and white.

Can you believe we've got you launched on your career, so let's have your fourth record?

Well, I'm going back to school time at this point. This was a record that somehow means a lot to me. I can't quite explain why it was a record that our music master used to play as an exercise.

He used to play it to the whole class and anybody who laughed during it would be given a detention. A slight exaggeration.

But and so we used to sit there trying not to laugh. And eventually I bought a copy of it and trained myself not to laugh at it. And actually I rather enjoy it.

Now is a strange thing, but I thought perhaps your listeners would like to listen. And if anybody can listen to it without laughing, I think perhaps we should give them a prize.

Now, there you see what you were laughing at, that I wasn't a perfectly straight face, I promise, Duop, for two violins and the six term system played by Vampyre and Stein, and it was by Hubber, wasn't laughing perfectly.

Straight-faced beautiful in its work. Now with Michael Palin and four others, you were in a series called Monty Python's Flying Circus. Yes.

That came about as much 69 at the time. Mike and I had just done the complete nada histories and we were recording the last series of Do Not Just Your Set and writing a pantomime for Watford rep at that time. And suddenly the telephone goes and it's John Cleese suggesting that we might like to do a show together.

He'd been on the passport, so we knew of him. Right.

And although I met sort of over a state several years before, we hadn't really known each other, but we kind of knew that they were writing the funniest stuff around as far as we were concerned, we'd seen the 1948 shows and things like that.

And so we grounded it and said, oh, yes, and can our friend Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, can they come along as well? And that's really how the six of us got together.

Well, that's five of you. Who was the other one? Graham Chapman. Six of you.

Just like the crazy guy that who invented Monty Python.

Oh, it was a tedious business for we sat around for week after week and we should have been writing scripts, trying to decide on names. We went through things like, oh, what was it? A horse, a spoon and a basin was one name.

My favourite was that you didn't say, well, I don't think there was another one.

The Toad Elevating Moment was one of my favorites. I like them. What about Owl stretching time? Any good?

No, sordid. You can see. The problem is how do you sort the jobs out? Who did what?

It's basically a fairly anarchic group, really. We kind of fell into roles.

I mean, insofar as we've got any I'm not sure that we have, except that I always made the coffee.

Who was coordinating all this? Did you have a producer or director who would say no?

Well, what happened was when the BBC approached us about doing a show, we'd just seen the Spike Milligan Show. So we said, well, we'd like in McNorton to be our director. Mm hmm.

And so we were working within. But basically it was the group. It was the six of us sort of autonomously producing the programmes and deciding what we were going to do and then presenting in with the material, which poor fellow he had to sort of get onto the screen, a lot of it pre film because, well, most of it pre film.

Yes, he was quite disciplined, actually. We'd write the whole series almost before we ever started doing anything.

So we the whole six of you. Yes, I was six. How many programs were in the first series? Thirteen. And how many series were.

There were three series with the six of us in and then a short of fourth series with without John Cleese.

Now he got a bit uppity. You wanted to go off and do his own thing.

I don't think he was being uppity. I think he sort of genuinely got a bit bored with the group as a group is very in a way it's a kind of release because you can do something that is sort of bigger than any single individual in it. But at the same time, you can never follow something like the way through. It's always going to be slightly fragmented because of six people putting in. And eventually, I think, comes a point when you feel you want to go right the way through with your own thing.

And I think John felt it earlier than the rest of us.

Let's have your first record now. I don't think I could possibly be on any desert island without the Beatles. It's difficult to choose any Beatles record more than another. But this one I remember hearing when I was driving my car across London, I suddenly heard this song and I didn't know who it was and it just electrified me.

I just sat up and said, Who on earth is that?

And it was only later I discovered it was the Beatles, the A in the motor. Penny Lane is in my office and in my. The Beatles Penny Lane, which, of course, is Liverpool, not very far from Colwyn Bay. Now music's Monty Python people set up in business together, but you're all going to live your own lives most of the time.

Yeah, I think it's kind of the essential thing. I mean, that's why the group is still being able to make films together, is that we've gone off our separate ways and does that release. So we don't we don't feel we're dependent upon each other anymore.

No more television series, but a feature film or two? Yes, I think so. The first one, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Well, the first one was actually called and now for something completely different.

But it was a compilation really of the first series material that had been on TV. So in a way, we kind of don't count that the Holy Grail was the first one which we wrote specifically as a film. And and we're able to do it ourselves now.

How did you work? I mean, six people sitting in a room arguing about a script must have taken a long, long time. Well, it wasn't too bad.

The Holy Grail, we weren't basically, as we did with the TV shows, which is that we would go off and separate and write our own little pieces and then come back together and read out the material we got. And after about sort of six weeks of doing that, we had a certain amount of material. Then we sort of split up for another six months and then got together again and decided, hey, look, we could make this into a medieval thing.

We could make it all about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. So then again, having decided on this subject, we then split up again and started writing individually. So we don't argue every line. Exactly. We actually sort of coming back, reading the stuff to each other and agreeing on what we like and what we don't like. It's pretty time consuming.

It is, I suppose. Yes, but it's the kind of essential part of it, because it's the internal criticism that goes on in that stage that I think is the strength of the group in a way.

Now, your second one, which you directed, Monty Python's Life of Brian, New Testament Times a messiah, a crucifixion. There were howls of protest. Yes.

I mean, a very misguided I think I think most of the protest came from people who hadn't actually seen the film. And subsequent to the protests, we had various churchmen then did eventually go and see the film and we were eventually getting very complimentary remarks from the church.

Know why? I mean, the fact that Brian's life was remarkably similar to that of a divinity was hardly a coincidence.

Oh, no. Well, in fact, the film did start off. We were going to actually write A Life of Christ. We thought it'd be quite interesting to write a funny life of Christ when we actually started working on it, which meant we went back to the Gospels and started reading them again.

I think we all very quickly came to the opinion that Christ was a very good bloke, saying not a very good thing that we all agreed with. And the humour wasn't in Christ at all. The humor was in the way in which somebody can come down and say things which are true and real. And then over the next 2000 years, people go ahead fighting and killing each other because they can't agree on what this good person has said. Yeah, and that is really what the life of Brian was doing, really.

Bryan himself wasn't Christ in the end. He was born in the next door manger. But the parallels are there. The parody is the parody on the church. So it's heresy rather than blasphemy. Well, that's comforting.

I hope they've marked that down for you upstair. And your third film was going to be the story of World War Three, but it turned into the meaning of life. Yes.

Well, just in case, you know, we didn't want events to overtake us and make the film obsolete. You see, um, the meaning of life.

Yes, I thought we thought it was time somebody tackle this subject. You know, we didn't want to leave it for somebody like, you know, Burgmann to take up or something and spoil it.

We thought we'd take a serious look at it. The new film was really back to the Monty Python television series. It's a series of sketches.

Well, I think we felt we'd never succeeded in making a 90 minute film that had a shape and yet still had the freedom of the old TV shows.

So in fact, I think the film is very different from the TV shows, but it does have that same feeling of freedom that you can go off in any direction and that it can use the animations to link it. It does.

And some more stuff, some more howls of protest, of course.

Well, I suppose that will be when we first showed it in New York, it was actually in Yonkers and we had an audience of about 400 high school children. And before the end of the film, 80 of them had walked out in protest and disgust and shock, horror, which I was very surprised about.

But I don't think there'll be any sort of organized protest in the same way that was with withdrawn. Mhm. I think basically it's offending too many people for them all to get together, you know. Yes. I think you were found everybody at one time or another. Yes, I think so. I think to get really good organized protest, some group has to feel you're directly getting specifically at them. But everybody can see we get it. Everybody else.

Right. Record number six. Well, this is really for the artist on it. It's a violent. And in Ginette Neveu, when I came across, because so have my French pen friend happened to be her nephew, what age was this? Oh, I must have been 15 or something.

And I heard the stories of Jeanette Neveu and how she died at such an early age in a plane crash and how her Stradivarius was unharmed on the seat beside her in the wreckage. And I also heard the family stories about how she was in the conservatory with who? Genuine and Jenette, they used to come top and hoodie's second. That was the family's story. And then they played me some of the records. And when I heard the records, I was just amazed by her violin playing.

I'm not a connoisseur of the violin, but it seems to me when I listen to her, there's this tremendous power and kind of forcefulness, almost sort of masculinity in what she's producing.

It's kind of totally unsentimental.

And yet in this piece of music, it kind of conjures up to me the sort of, I don't know, the world after the war and Europe in ruins, although it was written by Brahms quite a long time before.

Part of the first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto, played by, as you note, another with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Now, as I said between the film's Terry, you've all six been busy with your own projects. You and Michael Palin, for example, writing ripping yarns.

Yeah, that was the kind of desire to get into story. I mean, Mike and I had written some stories which we'd used in Python, and I wanted the feeling that Python could have gone into story lines even in the TV series, but it never did. So when Michael was offered the chance of doing his own show and he suggested to me that we write it together. I was very keen to get into this kind of storyline and I love stories.

You also achieved what most of us would like to do. You've got your own brewery.

Yes, well, it's not my own very early, but I certainly did set up a brewery in Hereford and it's working well.

Penrhos Court. Yes, it's wonderful. Well, when the beer is good, it's wonderful. And when it's not, it isn't.

I think the best thing about the brewery, in a way, was the fact that when I set it up, it was in 1976, kind of nobody thought about doing it for, I don't know, 100 years.

So I really hadn't seen anything set up much. And since we set it up, I think there's been like 60 or 70 little breweries all over the country kind of have sprung up.

And it's really it's making me think about, oh, no. Now you've written a book or two. Yes, indeed.

Yes. My fairy tale little fairy tales. Yes. This is a book I wrote my daughter Sally.

How old is very well. She's now nine.

She was five or six at the time I wrote the stories and I just thought it would be.

Well, I've been reading Grimston. I love fairy tales again, the idea of story. And I started reading Grimson Anderson and found that really they were a bit too long, a bit too waffly.

And to tell the truth or some bits of them I didn't really agree with, some of them are rather horrific. Well, yes.

You see, you take Snow White, for example, and you have this nice little story which you're reading to your daughter at bedtime. She's going to sleep in a nursery and you suddenly come to the end of it. And it says in the original version that the wicked stepmother was punished by being made to put on these red hot iron slippers and dance until she falls down dead. I don't really like something that condones violence in that way. I think there's plenty of room for violence in stories and in comedy, and I wouldn't excise it.

But I think it's the attitude to the violence which is important.

And you've written a serious piece of medieval scholarship, Chaucer's night.

Yes, that was something I had to get out of my system. And it started really when I was at Oxford.

I kind of felt that I didn't really understand 36 lines of Chaucer's poetry, his description of the night. And I suppose while we were doing Python, I think I started doing a little work at the British Museum and sort of ferreting away, doing a little research.

You decided that he wasn't a very parfit gentle knight.

No, it took me a long time to reach that conclusion. I just felt I couldn't understand why Chaucer wrote this list of battles in which he'd been involved.

When I know that elsewhere in Chaucer's work, he describes very pacifist sentiments and obviously clearly dislikes war and warns people that war is something to be avoided as far as men may. And I couldn't understand why. If he thought the night was a perfect, gentle night, he would have this list of battles spanning over something like 60 years. And so I started researching into those battles and it was the research into those that led me to the conclusion that the night was, in fact a type of his age.

He was a mercenary, which was a kind of a new style soldier in the 14th century. Well, there'd been mercenaries before, but it was an explosion of mercenary employment in the 14th century. And the mercenary armies of the 14th century of Charles De became a horrific element in society. For instance, the great company that formed itself in thirteen sixties, which was the people who are left over from the hundred years war when the peace was declared in 1860, always of work soldiers and said all going home.

They all say, what are we having a good time here? Let's get together. And they form themselves into a company that at one point was something like 16000 strong, according to one of the chroniclers.

And can you imagine, that's a band of brigands wandering through the countryside, 16000 strung up to all sorts of horrific enterprise.

Oh, they were just sort of raping, looting, burning the whole place down. And they weren't doing it for any creed, country or ideal just for what they could get out.

Has your case been accepted? And Chaucerian circles? I think it's accepted more by historians than maybe by the literary critics.

I think the case will eventually be accepted, but I think it's a difficult one for people to accept right now.

Record numbers. Hm.

Well, this is a man I think is one of the great songwriters of our time, Paul Simon.

And this song actually, I don't think is his best song by any means. But you know how sometimes somebody says something and he actually changes your way of thinking. I remember as a child being such a gloomy child very often.

I mean, I loved going to the cinema, but I was used to get very depressed about going to the cinema because I, I used to say, well, it's all going to be over in three hours.

And then I read the cover of a book by Bertrand Russell in which Bertrand Russell had just written on the cover of the book. I believe that happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it is transitory.

And I suddenly said, cause he's right and I became much more cheerful about it. And in this song by Paul Simon, although it's not one of his best songs, it does contain the lyrics, some lyrics that sort of change my way of looking at things, he says. Some people never say the words, I love you. It's not their style to be so bold. Some people never say the words I love you. Yet like a child, they're longing to be told.

Some people never say the words, I love you. Some people never say those words, I love you. To Paul Simon Singh So right. Gerri, what about life on a desert island? Could you cope, could you look after yourself? Are you a practical person?

I think if I was put to it, I'd be all right as long as I didn't have any accountants or people advising me what to do, I think I could.

Have you ever done any camping out? Yes. A little bit of handyman Richard Vamped, and I used to cycle down to the south coast once we we tried sleeping and unfortunately, our tent wasn't long enough for us.

Not both our legs stuck out the other end and it rained during the night. Now, what about food?

Could you look after yourself? Could you cultivate could you fish?

I'd have a go. I I'm not really a fisherman, but I think I'd, I'd certainly have a go at it. I enjoy cooking.

Would you try to escape. I'd be dead scared of that. The sea fills me with an unutterable fear and I love seeing it as long as I'm on dry land.

Right. Your last record. My last record is Imagine by John Lennon. Why I think it's one of the great songs about age.

Imagine there's no heaven. See if you try. Above us only sky. John Lennon, imagine if you could take only one disk today, which would it be? Oh, gosh, I didn't realize you didn't ask me that. Well, I think it would be imagined.

Right. And one luxury to take with you, one item, one object of no practical use at all that would give you pleasure to have.

Oh, can I take a pencil and paper? Yes, of course. I think that's what I do.

And one book you have, the authorized Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare provided a standard equipment. You can take one other book.

I take the complete works of Chaucer. Right. And thank you, Terry Jones, for letting us hear your desert island. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Are you still there? Good. There's someone I want you to meet, their name is John. They're 16 and they're in trouble. Follow Sean's journey by subscribing to Parrot on BBC said the world is dying. It's time to take action. Our.