When Terry Jones pops into the Cinéma Imperial to present An Evening With Mr. Creosote as part of Comedia, the nine-show crossover twixt Just For Laughs and Fantasia, it will be a historic occasion indeed.

Oh, not in the sense of the Governor General showing up or 21-gun salutes or anything. Come on, please. No. "Historic" in the sense that he'll be unearthing a good two decades' worth of outtakes and forgotten footage for fans to drool over. After all, Monty Python's Flying Circus, another decade and a half after the silly sextet amicably split apart, remain definitive of British humour and all the pip-pip, jolly-good, bloodyminded fun it can entail.

"I just sort of talk and show film clips from all the stuff we've done over the years," says Jones, "from the television shows and from films, The Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Meaning of Life. I'll show some pre-Python stuff, various TV shows that [fellow Python] Michael Palin and I did before Python, a show called A Complete and Utter History of Britain."

A complete and utter... sounds Pythonesque already. "The idea was, what if they'd had TV cameras back then? So it was a history of Britain with lots of silly jokes. Things like an interview with William the Conqueror in the showers after the Battle of Hastings, like a football match. You'll know how long ago it was done, because it was one of the last programs done in black and white."

Bringing life to history

Now if anyone knows how to present history (Monty Python's or otherwise) in an engaging context, it's Jones. Remember, he directed Python's satire of the dawn of Christianity, Life of Brian, and with Python animator Terry Gilliam co-directed the medieval mayhem of The Holy Grail. Since then, he's been rooting about even deeper in the dumpsters of antiquity.

"It's odd, really," he muses, "because Michael Palin was the historian, the one trained in history. He studied it at Oxford. I studied English literature there, but he's ended up doing geography, going around the world on exhibitions, and I've ended up gravitating towards history, which is something I didn't expect to do.

"I suppose it came out of my interest in Chaucer. When I was at Oxford, there was a section on the description of the knight in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, which didn't really make sense to me. It seemed a very boring piece, and I knew that what Chaucer wrote wasn't boring. There had to be something more to it. I felt we must be missing the point, so I started reading around it. Instead of reading the English literary critics, I read the historians and contemporary 14th century stuff. Eventually I wrote a book called Chaucer's Knight, which came out in 1980 and caused a fracas in the academic world. And still does, I may say."

While the academics may stiffen with resentment at Jones' re-reading of their dusty tomes, TV and film audiences have been sick with laughter. Jones and company have mined those tomes for a millennium or three of comedy gold. "Not being a professional historian, I have a somewhat different take on history. I guess what interests me about it is the similarities with now. Professional historians are interested in the differences, because in a way, to be cynical, they want to say, 'Look, you can't understand it unless you read it through my eyes.' What fascinates me is how, although things were expressed differently, people and their motives and reactions are the same."

A Grimm state of affairs

As if historical fact weren't enough, Jones also shows a fondness for, and in fact a deft hand with, fanciful flights of whimsy. He has a stack of children's books under his belt (some sort of exercise program, I gather), and his attempts at fairy tales (i.e. the book Fairy Tales) seem plucked from the same archetype-bearing tree as anything in the Grimm canon. "I've never thought of it before," he muses again, "but it's a bit like--I'm not comparing it, but Paul McCartney doing 'Mull of Kintyre.' You're sure you know that song, that it's an old folk song, but it's not! It's new!

"What happened was, my daughter was about five--this must have been 1977 or so. I thought, 'Oh, goody, goody! I can read her fairy tales!' I bought a book of Grimm's fairy tales, and one evening I was reading 'Snow White' to her. I'd got this awfully longwinded Victorian edition, and when we came to the ending, where the wicked stepmother is punished by being made to put on these red-hot iron slippers and dance until she falls down dead, I thought, I don't want my little daughter going to sleep thinking, 'I'm so glad they tortured that old lady to death.'

"I figured I'd have a go at it myself. The next day I wrote a couple and road-tested them on her in the evening. That went on for about a week, I got about a dozen written. It got a bit slower after that, but I thought I could maybe make a book of it. I got them all done in under a month."

That was just one of several books for kids that Jones has banged out, some of which were co-written with Palin. Another was Erik the Viking, later adapted to film, and also some collaborations with fairy king Brian Froud. The two had both worked on Jim Henson's film Labyrinth, and compiled overflow material afterwards. "We also did a book called Lady Cottington's Book of Pressed Fairies, which is actually the most successful book I've published. Lady Cottington's a girl who collects, instead of pressed flowers, squashed fairies. I'd written the diary for it." No word yet on Jones penning a guide to trapping, clubbing and skinning pesky leprechauns.

Swording things out

More recently, Jones has found himself responsible for a number of U.K. TV documentaries, such as the very witty four-hour series The Crusades. "A friend of mine proposed it to me, and I thought, 'Why, that's interesting. I don't know anything about the Crusades.' Doing these documentaries is like going on an intensive university course. You get all the top people to give you their latest work and tutorials. It's a crash course, really."

A crash course for Jones, but hopefully a teaser, to kickstart the viewer's curiosity about what's gone before. Some neat costumes, some cool graphics, a few surly battle scenes and of course Jones' own dry amusement amount to a pretty effective shot at it.

"All you can do with TV, really, is pique people's interest. What you can get in is just the headlines. When you've read all the stuff, it's staggering how little you can put into the program. There were so many stories that we simply had to cut out entirely. What interested me about doing it, though, was doing it from the Arab point of view. That's what hooked me--it was a great exploration of the Arab world, seeing things through Arab eyes."

Last year, beating Ridley Scott to the punch, Jones did a doc called Gladiators: The Brutal Truth. "I found out that the gladiatorial sports weren't just a product of decadent Rome. It was a very militaristic society, grown up by the sword. When they became more successful, they were worried that the young men would become effete. So going to see death in the arena, to see how men who met death bravely were cheered by the crowd, and how cowards were booed and hissed, was a big lesson for every young Roman.

"I think the Romans regarded the games as very moral. The only occasional complaints you'd get from the period were about killing off convicts. They'd throw convicts in and have them killed during the intervals, just for fun. People would say that this wasn't an edifying sight, this is wrong. But seeing the gladiators meeting their deaths bravely, that was a very moral thing."

He drifts off thoughtfully for a moment, then springs back with a far more characteristic observation: "Rather weird lot, that bunch!" :

COMEDIA: the Fantasia/Just for Laughs crossover