The Young Ones is a British sitcom written by Rik Mayall, Ben Elton, and Lise Mayer, starring Adrian Edmondson, Mayall, Nigel Planer, Christopher Ryan, and Alexei Sayle, and broadcast on BBC Two for two series, first shown in 1982 and 1984. The show focused on the lives of four dissimilar students and their landlord's family on different plots that often included anarchic, offbeat, surreal humour. The show often included slapstick gags, visual humour and surreal jokes sometimes acted out by puppets, with each episode also featuring a notable selection of guest stars and musical numbers from various performers.
The Young Ones helped bring alternative comedy to British television in the 1980s and made household names of its writers and performers. The show became a notable icon of 1980s British popular culture, and it received its own game and a home-media release while becoming the first non-music-related programme to appear on MTV in the United States in 1985. The show was voted number 31 in the BBC's Best Sitcom poll in 2004.
History
In the early 1980s, much of the programme's cast performed on London's comedy club circuit, gaining significant popularity at The Comedy Store[2]—Alexei Sayle was the prominent act, drawing attention as the manic, aggressive compere; Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall worked together in the troupe 20th Century Coyote and later became the double act The Dangerous Brothers; and Nigel Planer worked in the double act "The Outer Limits" alongside Peter Richardson.[3] All principal members later opted to make their own club as The Comedy Store became popular, and they formed The Comic Strip in the Raymond Revuebar club in Soho with French and Saunders and Arnold Brown.[4] The new club proved immensely popular amongst London's comedy venues and brought the group to the attention of Jeremy Isaacs, head of the new Channel 4.
Richardson opted to bring the group to television in a project entitled The Comic Strip Presents... and began negotiations with the new channel to secure a deal for a series of six self-contained half-hour films, in which the group would perform as comedy actors rather than stand-up performers. Channel 4 agreed to the deal and aired the programme on the channel's opening night on 2 November 1982. In response to this, the BBC opted to recruit the group for their own comedy projects, and they began negotiations with Edmondson, Mayall, Richardson, Planer and Sayle to star in a sitcom that would operate on a similar broadcast arrangement, under the title of The Young Ones, which alludes to and subverts the song of the same name, written by Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett and performed by Cliff Richard and The Shadows, which had become a No. 1 UK hit single in 1962. The group agreed to join the project and work proceeded on the sitcom, with Mayall co-writing the scripts with his then girlfriend Lise Mayer,[5] and Ben Elton (who had attended the University of Manchester with Mayall and Edmondson). Paul Jackson was installed as a producer,[6] but his presence led to him clashing with Richardson, forcing the latter to abandon the project.[3] As a result, his replacement was Christopher Ryan, the only member of the group who was not a stand-up comedian. According to Jackson, the finished project was met with complete disbelief by the BBC, but the recent arrival of Channel 4 led the broadcaster to air what had been created a week after its opening night, on 9 November.
To help make it stand out, the group opted to combine traditional sitcom style with violent slapstick, non-sequitur plot turns, and surrealism. These older styles were mixed with the working and lower-middle class attitudes of the growing 1980s alternative comedy boom, in which all the principal performers except Ryan had been involved. In addition, it was also decided that every episode, with the exception of one, would feature a live performance by a band, including Madness, Motörhead, and The Damned. This was a device used to qualify the series for a larger budget, as "variety" shows attracted higher fees than "comedy" at the time.[8] Episodes were generally produced to be over 35 minutes long, though were edited to half-hour when later repeated on the BBC or satellite channels.
Premise
The programme focuses on the lives of four undergraduate students who share a house in squalid condition (with the fictitious address of 15 Credibility Street), while attending their studies at the fictional Scumbag College, London.[2]
The content of the episodes could be classified as a comedy of manners,[9] because of its take on British culture, political climate and social backgrounds during the 1980s. A particular example of this is the second series' use of "flash frames", in each episode, to mock the public's fear of subliminal messages in television and music.[10] The Young Ones was more notable for its use of violent slapstick, which Edmondson and Mayall had been using in their double-act routines, the use of surreal elements such as puppets playing the role of talking animals or objects (in a similar manner to The Goodies), use of lengthy cutaways with no relation to the episode's plot,[11] and frequent breaches of the fourth wall for comedic efforts, either to break a punchline to a joke or make a plot point obvious; in several occasions, Sayle used this element to break from his character and address the audience in his real-life Liverpudlian accent.