Didn’t you notice that both of your links go to the same article, written by Doug Ganley of CNN?
And my memory tells me you’re both wrong, that it was definitely Terry Jones. Which would make more sense as he was far more likely to have been living in England at the time.
Didn’t they tell this story on Regis & Kelly? I’m they said Gilliam.
My memory agrees with yours, so I did a little digging. According their autobiography The Pythons, it was indeed Terry Jones, who states it on page 268 (available on Google Books):
I didn’t write that post. My evil twin brother, semicolonsense, used my computer while I was in the bathroom.
Bad semicolonsense!
FWIW, the recent documentary does say it was Gilliam who rescued the shows by buying the tapes. So someone’s got it wrong, or both things happened, perhaps for different seasons?
I just re-watched the episode (#3: And Now The Sordid Personal Bits), and found the source of the confusion.
At about 10 minutes in, Eric Idle, Steve Coogan and Terry G. are recalling all the other shows that the BBC wiped to save tapes, and Terry G. says (all quotes are paraphrased), “They were about to wipe the Python tapes, and Terry spotted that.” Cut to Steve Coogan, who says, “So he bought videotapes and kept them in his attic.”
Cut back to Terry G., who says the BBC called him and said they had a lot of cans of film that they were going to throw away. He went there and found it was all of his animation. (This is said over footage of someone unspooling some 16mm film into a trash can.) He laments that they didn’t understand the value of what they had.
Coogan then says that later on when there was a demand to re-run Python, the Beeb had to borrow the tapes back from Terry.
The key distinction here is between videotape and film. Videotape can be erased and reused, but film cannot. The “videotapes” in question were the finished recordings of entire MPFC shows. The “film” Terry G. spoke about was the short animation sequences he shot, which were incorporated into those shows.
Someone (like the writer of the cited article, apparently) who didn’t grasp that distinction might have assumed that the film Terry G. mentioned was the same as the videotapes he and Coogan had been talking about, and that Terry G. was the one who save the tapes.
But Terry G. starts the conversation by saying that “Terry spotted that,” so assuming that he wasn’t speaking of himself in the third person, the obvious conclusion is that Terry Jones, not Terry Gilliam, saved the MPFC tapes from destruction and stored them in his attic. Q.E.D.
BTW, just before that segment, they talk about the winetasting sketch. It seems that they did actually tape it, because they say that a pinkish tint to one of the glasses led the BBC censors to conclude it was menstrual urine, and that’s why the sketch was cut. But there’s no hint as to whether a recording of it still exists.
When the Pythons (minus Michael) were interviewed by Jimmy Fallon recently, Terry J. said that he smuggled out copies of the shows, and for a while he thought that the only remaining copies in the world were in his house.
It’s Terry Jones who kept an archive of everything he worked on that he was allowed (or in this case, not allowed) to take home. It’s clearly Terry Jones who did this, as it was mentioned earlier (because this redundant documentary doesn’t bring any new facts).