Michael Palin says Terry Jones statue would have been very funny, Colwyn Bay unveils tribute

Terry Jones is being cast in bronze not as a director, writer or historian, but as the nude organist, the grinning, tie-flapping figure that helped define Monty Python’s most anarchic television years. The statue, to be unveiled in Colwyn Bay on Saturday, 25 April 2026, turns Jones’s comic identity into a public landmark and asks a bigger question about who gets remembered when a cultural movement hardens into canon.

Sir Michael Palin said Jones would have found the statue “very funny indeed”, a fitting verdict for a tribute that leans into the silliness rather than away from it. The sculpture depicts Jones nude apart from a flapping tie and “exploded” hair, echoing the recurring character from Monty Python’s Flying Circus that made absurdity look ceremonial. Palin and Terry Gilliam were due to attend the unveiling alongside Jones’s family.

The choice of Colwyn Bay is inseparable from Jones’s own story. He was born in Old Colwyn, just along the coast in North Wales, and the statue will stand on the promenade between Porth Eirias and the Pier. That location turns the tribute into something more than a fan project: it places Jones back in the landscape that formed him, while giving the town a permanent claim on one of Britain’s most influential comedy figures.

The campaign behind the memorial, A Python On The Prom, launched in September 2024 and raised about £120,000 from comedy fans around the world. John Cleese and Eric Idle also backed the effort, underlining how strongly the surviving Python generation rallied around a tribute that places Jones at the centre of the story rather than at its edges. The unveiling was being organised with support from Theatr Colwyn, Conwy Arts Trust and Jones’s family, with a Python-themed day of events planned around costumes, recreations of classic sketches and other silliness.

Jones died in 2020 at the age of 77 after suffering from a rare form of dementia. The statue does more than memorialise a beloved performer; it corrects the balance of cultural memory. Monty Python is often remembered through the louder public personas of Palin, Cleese, Idle and Gilliam, yet Jones’s work ran through the troupe’s writing, performing and visual imagination. By putting the nude organist on the promenade at Colwyn Bay, the tribute gives Jones a public afterlife that is both unmistakably comic and overdue.