Michael Palin has told how the final time he saw Terry Jones he sang him a classic Monty Python song - and forgot all the words.
The comic actor visited his film and TV co-star at home in January this year shortly before he died from dementia, aged 77.
Palin described how he and Jones's wife, Anna, decided to sing 'Every Sperm Is Sacred', which the pair had written together for the 1983 Python film,'The Meaning of Life'.
In the Jones-directed movie, Palin sings the song while playing a devout Catholic who has dozens of children.
But almost 40 years on from the film's release, Palin was unable to remember the lyrics.
"He clearly was very unwell," he told The Oldie magazine.
"But I talked to him as I always did. I wouldn't accept the dementia had shut his understanding up. It had shut his communication up.
"We sang 'Every Sperm Is Sacred' from 'The Meaning of Life'. Unfortunately we couldn't remember all the words. So if Terry was hearing me at all then,he just heard what a complete shower we were."
Palin - who met Jones when they were students at Oxford in the 1960s and went on to form Monty Python with John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam - said he had previously managed to Jones laugh.
A year before Palin said he read extracts of a book they had written together, Dr Fegg's Encyclopaedia of All World Knowledge, at his bedside.
"Rather like when you listen to a piece of music you know, he immediately reacted and laughed at two or three points," he said.
"I hadn't heard him laugh for such a long time. The great thing was he laughed only at the bits he'd written. He's truly defeated the dementia there."
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