A few people have spotted that our video interview with Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam has fallen off the internet. They have asked for it back. Well, I’m very happy to help. Because, well, if you’d met Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, you’d want to bring that up in public every now and then. Have I mentioned that I met Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam? It was in the context of their promoting “their” Facebook game, about which they clearly cared not a jot, so I took the chance to ask them about things I hoped were important to them. Silliness, imagination, conflict, and education. You can see it once again below.

Goodness knows what’s happened to the game. It’s been in beta for almost a year now, with no signs of moving forward – in fact I just checked, and the beta isn’t even running any more. The game’s blog hasn’t been updated for over 11 months. Developer Zattikka’s own website now just bleakly declares, “Zattikka is changing. More news coming soon.” It’s reasonably safe to say something’s wrong there. But fortunately the interview was never about the game.

Instead it’s about how the world attempts to limit us, and the role of imagination in breaking free of that. How silliness is so important to being an adult, and how a lack of history education is dangerous for new generations. It’s safe to say there’s no other interview I’ve conducted where Heinrich Heine, Fanny And Alexander, and Lies My Teacher Told Me are mentioned.



To experience this #content, you will need to enable targeting cookies. Yes, we know. Sorry.

Manage cookie settings



We had some strange issues with the video. For some reason in the conversion from 80 billion terabytes original to an edited uploadable file, green flashes emerged. The wonderful Christo did an amazing job editing it for us so instead it simple pauses for a second or two. Also, the editing that rescued us when we discovered they’d not recorded my voice at all was by the amazing Jo Dolby.