Chief Superintendent Harry “Snapper” Organs, 1942–2020

In comedy, for me, there is Monty Python, then there is the rest.

The first time I saw Terry Jones — I was ten or eleven — he was a frustrated bridegroom trying to convince a registrar to marry him: the registrar thinking that the groom wanted to, you know, marry him. The sketch finishes up with the groom, the registrar, and three other men all marrying each other — “but you mustn’t ask how, ‘cos it’s naughty”.

I laughed till I choked. I had been raised on great comedy — my parents ensured it — but here was something I had never seen before. So incredibly clever and incredibly silly at the same time: surreal and ridiculous and manic, switching in seconds from witty wordplay to sublimely stupid sight gags. From that marriage sketch I was quickly rushed into a blizzard of bizarre cartoons and funny voices and wonderful wonderful madness in a show that packed more ideas into half an hour than anything before or since.

From that moment on I was not the same. I was addicted, obsessed and infatuated. I still am. The breakneck, headlong tumble to laughter that Monty Python epitomised was, and is, everything. And at the heart of that was Terry Jones.

Jones was responsible for much of what made Python unique. The stream-of-consciousness style of the TV show was largely down to his vision: sketches linked and flowing from one to the other rather than simply cutting to the next bit, a very different way of doing sketch than had been done up till then.