Not Funny
The death of Terry Jones the other day left me wanting to write everything about what he meant to me as a young fan of comedy, which meant I ended up writing nothing. Here he is talking about his dementia in 2017. What a gift to us all his life and work were.
Commenting on the death of Nicholas Parsons is more manageable, if only because his legacy was more focussed. Growing up in Australia I knew him only from The Goodies, where he was a regular target of jokes—affectionate ones, I realised in hindsight, although they were clearly having a go at a side of him that came across (from a younger man) as smarmy and patronising. After moving to the UK I grew to love listening to him on Just a Minute, and am glad I was able to do so for almost two decades; how extraordinary that that was less than half of his reign on the show.