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Even though a lot has been written about The Young Ones, there's still misconceptions regarding the series, as so much of it is reliant on the memories of those involved. Producer Paul Jackson had recorded a couple of commentary tracks for a 2007 DVD release when he was approaching his 60th birthday, and recorded four more for the BluRay release in 2022, when he was in his 70s. This is not to suggest that he was losing his memory, but just the distance of time is a factor - the BluRay was a 40th anniversary release, meaning he was having to recall things he'd done four decades previously. As we've already observed, memories can be unreliable things.
It might seem exceptionally arrogant to suggest that The Anorak Zone can tell you more accurate facts about The Young Ones than the man who actually produced the programme, but we have to go there in order to get to the truth behind certain events. On the commentary track for Demolition, Jackson claimed: "I don't think this series would have ever got made if Channel 4 hadn't made The Comic Strip. There was Five Go Mad In Dorset, went out first night, and somebody at the BBC said "Aren't they all those blokes in that funny little pilot that we threw away? Let's dust it off [...] and they phoned us up and said 'Can you do five next week?' Yep. That's the only reason it happened in all fairness."
Except... this can't actually be true. While The Comic Strip Presents... did manage to reach broadcast first, going out on Channel 4's launch night of 2nd November 1982, Demolition aired just one week later, followed by the rest of the first series. A look at the recording dates show that Demolition had its two studio days on 23rd/24th January 1982, and, while the BBC sat on it for six months, the rest of the first series was shot from July-September 1982, two months before The Comic Strip was broadcast.
It's possible that the BBC had noticed some of the buzz around alternative comedy, and there'd been a mock documentary about The Comic Strip in cinemas during 1981, but the entire first series of The Young Ones was recorded before Channel 4 had even launched. Probably something closer to the truth is Paul Jackson's remark when introducing a 1981 Boom Boom... Out Go The Lights on the BluRay, which contradicts his statements made elsewhere: "[...] Channel Four had announced... around this time that these guys were all gonna be part of the new Channel Four line-up." (On the first page of this article it was mentioned that the enjoyable commentaries can't be regarded as essential listening. With Paul Jackson's, this is the reason... he says a lot of interesting things worth hearing, but how can we be sure he hasn't misremembered?)
Flood was the second episode to be shot on 29th-30th July 1982, which perhaps explains a few things, such as why Alexei Sayle is still in his Jerzy the landlord persona, and not one of his "different relative every week" guises. Flood is also, of course, the only episode NOT to have a music act, instead opting for a lion tamer - something that seems a little out of place when watching it as the final part of a six episode run, but makes much more sense when you consider it was only the second to be shot and they were probably still working out the "variety" part of the show.
And that brings us back to the idea of the full facts behind the series not being quite known. There's talk of why The Young Ones had variety acts, with many quotes attributed to the crew stating it was deliberate to get more money to make the programme. Alexei Sayle's version of events is slightly different in his 2016 autobiography Thatcher Stole My Trousers: "We were compelled to have a band on every week because Paul Jackson's official designation was as a variety rather than a comedy producer, so The Young Ones was therefore technically a variety programme, in the same category as The Black and White Minstrel Show, which meant that a music act was required. This was turned into a strength by having the bands perform in various bits of the house."
While Alexei's statement makes logical sense, even his recall has to be regarded as potentially fallible, particularly as he wouldn't have been involved in such negotiations, proving that we can only really believe the "facts" about The Young Ones if we have concrete proof. (Ben Elton's recollection was that the bands in the series were part of Rik's original idea, said to him in the pub before it had ever been pitched to the BBC.)
One last piece of background trivia with this one... we've discussed that it's never entirely clear who wrote what in the show. But there's a cutaway in this one with Rik and Ade as two alien watchers. It's wonderfully offbeat and obscure, and, if you want to imagine the series has a continuity, you can pretend they're looking for the UFO seen in Boring. Yet it appears to be this scene that Ben Elton derides in What Have I Done?, when he branches off from slating Harold Pinter: "Rik always really liked him - which, of course, is why we have that awful bit in The Young Ones with him and Ade talking complete bollocks in an attic. I still absolutely cringe at the memory of how shit that was. Ade agrees with me about that scene, but not about Pinter, whom he also reveres. I know I'm in the minority on this one."
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One discussion point regarding The Young Ones is: how ground-breaking was it really? People of the generation that grew up with it like to think it really broke barriers (myself included), but would TV have thrown up something similar anyway? BBC2 had shown a couple of "alternative cabaret" reviews in 1980/81 called Boom Boom... Out Go The Lights, which showcased the "Rick the poet" and "Neil" characters, both of which were part of Mayall and Planer's stand-up acts before the series was even thought of.
And while other vehicles existed for the core members, most notably The Comic Strip Presents... on Channel 4, other shows were also beginning to take on performers from the new wave comedy circuit. ITV's OTT wasn't an especially experimental show - it was basically TISWAS for adults - but it featured not only regular stand-up spots for Alexei Sayle, it had also had appearances from his band, Radical Posture, and an appearance from Nine Below Zero.
This is brought to mind here with Alexei Sayle essaying his "Cockney mod" routine to try and buy a nuclear bomb off the boys. Although he brings new things to it, he'd done the character on both Boom Boom... Out Go The Lights and OTT. On February 27th 1982 he was indulging in some live "Cockney patter" on ITV, then on the 2nd September the same year he was in the studio recording Bomb. (Incidentally, the last of the first series episodes to be recorded.)
Another thing that often gets talked about with the show are the various bands and acts, with the suggestion that the show really hit a pop culture nerve. With the whole thing now over 40 years in the past, it's sometimes easy to forget that the nature of TV meant this was never the case.
When this edition was shot, Dexys Midnight Runners' new single "Jackie Wilson Said" was due to be released three weeks later. In October it peaked at No.5, and in mid-November it left the UK Top 75. By the time this episode was finally broadcast in late November, it had fallen out of the charts for a fortnight - and this was the nearest The Young Ones came to a topical hit number as it was broadcast.
The acts were generally selected just by whether the cast and crew personally liked them, so it didn't really matter that both appearances by Madness saw them performing tracks that had fallen out of the charts before they were even made, let alone broadcast, though looking back at Sick it's easy to forget that the band aren't performing their current Top 5 hit "Our House", but a track that had been out of the charts for over a year.
Some of them were deliberate revisits of old hits - Ace of Spades was over three years old - but lesser-known bands like Amazulu or Rip, Rig & Panic couldn't be expected to capitalise on their appearances when the average time between second studio day and broadcast was - not counting the delayed pilot - 95 days. (As a point of trivia - as if this whole entry hasn't been trivial enough - then Time was the episode that aired the quickest after its second studio day, being broadcast just 46 days later.)
Whether it was genuinely innovative or just part of an overall movement, The Young Ones did feel special. And different. Bomb scrapes into the top five as it shows some of the edge from the first series that got shorn off when the show became more overtly comedic later. There are patches where the pacing is a little "off", but it experiments well with "anti-comedy", and also overt comedy, with Roger Sloman superb as the TV detector man. (Somewhat typical of the series, he's forgotten about in the plot later.)
The political elements come into play with three elderly women vandalising a phone box (covered with racist graffiti) saying they're doing it to get the young in trouble as "Perhaps it'll stop them raping old ladies." (The commentary track by Paul Jackson and Ed Bye reveals that the actress couldn't bring herself to say the word "raping" after multiple takes, so just mouthed the word and said the rest of the line - in the end result, she was post-dubbed by another actress.)
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The second series is crasser, coarser and more juvenile than the first, but Sick succeeds despite it. Or, maybe in this case, because of it. On a personal note, I was eleven when Sick first aired, and while it may seem a little too childish now, it was ideal viewing for that age. Rick screaming can grate to an adult (he gets very screechy in S2), but as a child it was hysterical. As was Vyvyan with the petrol bomb. As was the snot. As was Alexei Sayle describing how he'd bitten someone's head off for being sar-car-stic. As was... etc., etc.
Sick is also significant in that it's the episode with the most "additional" footage still in the archives. On the BluRay Collection you can see all of the following:
* The aforementioned Just For Laughs, a highlights/outtakes package put together for a wrap party. On it there are some goofs, along with short sequences of unused dialogue. (Mike in Rick's dream as a judge gets a pretty desperate "well hung" gag which made it on the cutting room floor, and rightly so, but it's nice to get chance to see it);
* There were some fake "street interviews" recorded, talking about the virtues of Domestos, which would have presumably been slotted in after the toilet asks what Domestos is. They're a curiously unfunny selection of clips, which probably explains why they weren't used, but again, it's nice to get to see them.
* A "working print" of the episode with some different takes.
One key element of this edition is an extended rant by Vyvyan, blasting The Good Life. Just over nine years later, Edmondson would play Richard Briers' nephew in the comedy If You See God, Tell Him, with Edmondson recalling in Beserker!: "On our first meeting Richard quotes it to me more or less verbatim. It takes quite a lot of reversing out of - I tell him I wasn't the writer, I was just the actor - but that sounds a bit like the Nazi guard saying he was 'only following orders'."
Part of that quoted rant included Vyvyan describing Briers as "sugar-flavoured snot", but with his enunication, it instead sounds like Edmondson is saying the more surreal "sugar-flavoured snob". However, while "snob" would perhaps be more abstract, Lise Mayer kindly confirmed via Twitter in April 2020 that it's "definitely snot". Now, as far as original research gleaned from one of the creative people behind the show goes, this isn't a massive revelation... but I made the effort.
This is, incidentally, the only episode where we get to learn the surname of a character. Neil's parents turn up, and the mother is addressed by Mike as "Mrs. Pye". The Young Ones book tries to give us names like Vyvyan Basterd, but onscreen this is the only one.
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The beauty of series one is that, in among the comic violence and arguments, there's an attempt to build a real student life between the main characters, with arguments about who's making the tea and the group watching television together. This mundanity is mixed with surrealism, and even very left-field sequences that confuse the audience - in particular, the much-derided two-minute-plus cutaway sequence that features two businessmen hallucinating that they're lost at sea while in the house basement.
We'll talk more about Mike in the next entry, but this would have been a much better "first episode" as far as his character is concerned. He drives the plot here, taking over the house, and also has a secret plan to dispose of a dead body, of which the others are unaware. We only see a glimpse of the character's bedroom in series two (Mike being ill by some venetian blinds in Sick), whereas this edition introduces his loft room, which is where much of the odder things take place.
In fact, Oil might be the strangest episode of The Young Ones. There's so much in there that's not even "ha ha" funny, as just plain weird, or eerie. Adrian Edmondson believed the show should have just been about the four core characters as the main focus, and particularly cited the businessmen as a low point in Beserker!. ("It was deadly boring at the time but now it looks insane, and not in a 'zany' funny way. It looks plain wrong, like it's from another show. A really crap show.")
One thing really holding this episode back today is the extremely audible studio audience, who distractingly shriek over almost every line. As this same laughter occurs over the amusing first series trailer, it seems to have been recorded on the same day. Not that a studio audience is a bad thing in and of itself, and it certainly adds to the performances of the cast. But this one has a audience members who are so distracting that it once saw this brilliant episode ranked last... which was a real mistake. And, frankly, wasn't something I even noticed when I watched it as a kid.
But talking of laughter, there's a happily guffawing male voice in the audience throughout a lot of the episodes of The Young Ones, a reassuring and distinctive laugh that keeps cropping up. Last time out there was speculation over this "mystery laugher", with warm-up man Felix Bowness suggested as the possible culprit. But the person in question is so noticeable that Adrian Edmondson referenced it himself when he was rewatching this episode to talk about The Young Ones in Beserker!:
"There's one laugh I can hear that crops up all the time, it's a constant at every show we do, including every studio night for Bottom, and that's Rik's brother Ant. He's such a brilliant supporter of all our endeavours. He's not a plant, his laugh is genuine, but he's always slightly ahead of everyone else, and he's infectious. Every audience needs a 'seed' laugher - someone who shows them it's all right to laugh - and Ant is our man. His laugh is just a beautiful and innocent expression of joy and delight [...]". After hunting for this information for some time, it was also mentioned by Lise Mayer (yes, the laugh is that distinctive) in an episode of The Alexei Sayle Podcast.
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Demolition is perhaps the ultimate distillation of the "alternative" ethos, a magnificent Brechtian construct of intentional dead laughs, and centred around a lead character wanting to commit suicide.
But, with Demolition, it's time to talk about Mike. The performer originally due to play him, as you're probably aware, was Peter Richardson, who was with Nigel Planer in a comedy duo called "The Outer Limits". You can see Nigel and Peter together (Nigel as a hairless version of Neil) in the second of two comedy revue shows, Boom Boom... Out Go The Lights, which was broadcast in 1981 and appears as an extra on The Young Ones BluRay.
But where could you get a real idea of what he would be like as Mike? Probably the nearest thing is a 1983 episode of The Comic Strip Presents..., which featured Richardson as a member of a rock group along with Mayall, Edmondson and Planer: Bad News Tour. In many ways the Mike we got on screen was more of a "straight man" to anchor the show to some sense of reality, but there's the sense with Richardson he could have made Mike a funny character in and of itself.
While many don't see the humour in someone saying they're "cool", the idea of Mike being "cool" is often misunderstood, as while some visiting characters seem to quite like him (such as some other students in Interesting), generally the only people who think he's in any way cool are the other housemates, who are just bigger losers than he is. In just the second episode to be aired we see Mike with a tape recording of a "female" voice in ecstasy to convince the others he's a stud, and in Nasty we learn that he's a virgin just like the rest of them. Richardson understood this, with Ben Elton claiming it was Peter who came up with the name "Mike The Cool Person", which, in the right hands, flags up how ridiculous the character was, and could have been.
In the end result, Richardson didn't take part in the show. In The Talking Bottom Podcast, Richardson said that issues with producer Paul Jackson began right from the start, when the first version of Boom Boom... Out Go The Lights had him split up the two double acts, putting Rik and Nigel on the show, but dropping their comic partners, Edmondson and Richardson. The second edition saw him take them all on, but then state he didn't to take on French and Saunders in the show: "I was really cross with him... I said 'You can't come and cherry pick this gang'... you know, we're part of a group now, you know. So, anyway, that sort of... basically alienated me fr.. you know, I was... I was definitely not going to be... considered for The Young Ones. Which, I'd written two characters out of it, you know. The Mike and... Neil, were both sort of characters I invented."
In the commentary track for this episode, Paul Jackson doesn't recall any issues with Richardson, but says it was due to a rivalry between the BBC and Channel 4 over Richardson's involvement in The Comic Strip Presents... yet as we've discussed, Jackson's recall of events can be inaccurate.
One person who was close to events was Nigel Planer, who speaks with great affection of Richardson in his autobiography, but is also aware that he could be difficult: "Peter seemed almost proud to piss off all Powers That Be at the BBC. [...] So by the time it came to our meeting with Paul Jackson at the BBC, I’d had some practice at trying to handle Peter's short fuse when in the company of TV execs. [...] Paul Jackson's patience was being tested, and he was, like Peter, a man with a shortish fuse." (Just in case there's not enough autobiography quotes in this article, then Jennifer Saunders gave her take in her 2014 tome Bonkers: A Life In Laughs: "The problem with Pete was, he always had to be in charge, and still does. Pete had his own ideas and wanted to make films. Pete was, and still is, a man who decides what he's going to do and does it.")
With Richardson out, several other actors were considered (including all of the guys in the "Street Level" skit), and the role went to Christopher Ryan. In Beserker!, Adrian Edmondson says that one of the difficult times he had on the show was when the cast had to become each other in Bambi, as he never really had a good idea of who Mike actually was. Edmondson also noted: "In the long run Chris is not treated well by the programme makers, the press or the general public. Once Pete removes himself from the equation, the three writers struggle to agree on what Mike the Cool Person is, the writing for him is generally quite confused, and the character becomes slightly neglected."
Christopher Ryan is liked just fine here at The Anorak Zone, and another possible misconception about the character is that Mike is a mature student compared to the rest of them. Yet this isn't necessarily the case. Ryan had turned 32 just two days before shooting began on Demolition, but that doesn't mean that the character was. Neil, happily accepted as being the same age range as Rick and Vyvvan, was played by a Nigel Planer who was less than a month off his 29th birthday. Rik, the "baby" of the main cast, was the best part of 24 when this was shot, so all were obviously playing significantly below their real ages. (Peter Richardson, less than 2 years younger than Ryan, would have also been 30 when filming commenced.)
In 2018 Christopher took part in a discussion for BBC Sounds, which you can still listen to online. Ryan stated that he only found out others were up for the part after the two series had been shot, but was down on his own performance, stating: "I still feel that I didn't really... I think it... I feel it would have been much better with... Peter Richardson could have done it... I thought Keith Allen had that edge...". Nigel Planer, also in the chat, disagreed with Ryan, telling him: "I think you're doing yourself down a bit there. If we'd had yet another person from the group being silly and crazy all over the place, that would somehow - the thing would have become boundaryless and.... you're very funny, and you.. and you kind of anchored the whole thing. So I think we got lucky." (Nigel would go on to echo this statement in his autobiography with: "The rest of us had been working together for a few years, our group connection firmly established. He was a stage actor who suddenly had to hold his own among us. My feeling is that if we had had another crazy comedian from the Comedy Store pack playing Mike, it wouldn't have worked so well. Chris anchored it.")
It's a pretty solid assessment by Planer. Watching the episodes again, you might be surprised at how good Ryan's comic timing is, given that he was an actor performing a comedic part, rather than a comedian trying to act (though Planer was also an established actor as well as a stand-up, of course). You might also be surprised at how good some of the material he's given is. Not as memorable as the other core cast, of course, but then he is the sort-of "straight man", so you can't expect that. You might also be surprised at how he's often the one who interacts the most with Alexei, or how often he breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience, having a connection just like the other characters. (A nerdish regret for this article is that I hadn't counted how many fourth wall breaks each of them did.)
In fact, put on 10 of the 12 Young Ones episodes and you might agree there's good material for Mike, well delivered, and he has good rapport with the cast, who knew each other before the show, and so had time to build up chemistry. There are just 2 episodes where he isn't well served, where he isn't really given much material to work with, and his dialogue is the left-field, "what is he talking about?" odd form of speech that doesn't connect so well with the audience.
One of those two episodes is Bomb. The other is, significantly, this first episode. First impressions - or, in this case, first non-impressions - count. All of the three other housemates instantly connect with the studio audience, but Mike's entrance is met with some muted confusion. Who is this person? Why is he telling us he's cool? And is his height a deliberate part of the character? (Ryan, talking to The Guardian in 2022: "Everyone involved was brilliant: witty, clever, energetic. I didn’t feel I really belonged. I wasn’t of their stable. Nothing against them because they were fantastic. But I never got hold of that character. People often say: "You must have had great fun; you must have really enjoyed it." And I always say: "I wish I had." It was brilliantly written. But I was never relaxed enough to enjoy it.")
In What Have I Done?, Ben Elton praises Chris Ryan but says he wasn't right for the part, and that: "Some of the creative decisions were just ridiculous. I was on the back foot by then and didn't play any further part in the development of Mike, but when I saw the golfing outfit that Rik and Lise had decided to put Chris in, I nearly wept. Talking rats and random stuff aside, the central quality of The Young Ones is that it was recognition comedy. [...] Where on earth did a pristine clean golfing kit, £1000 sets of clubs and immaculate pinstripe suits fit in? [...] On the page, Mike had been a real character. Just like Rick, Vyvian (sic) and Neil, he was rooted in truth. The students' unions of 1982 were full of Mikes. The ridiculous direction it took still makes me sad a whole lifetime later."
It's easy to disagree with some of what Ben thinks (he believes he would have been a better Mike, for example, which was a serious consideration after Richardson stepped away) but it's hard to disagree with such a take here. Demolition is a great episode which gives fantastic introductions to every main character... except for Mike. As the show continues, people already have it in their heads that he's the "unfunny" one that they "don't get", and the rest of the show is an exercise in trying to dislodge that notion.
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So, the original concept of The Young Ones was built up around the characters of Rick and Neil, which were stand-up characters created before the show. Peter Richardson's assertion that he'd "sort of" created the character of Neil may surprise, as it's commonly been thought that it was Nigel Planer's invention. The truth may be a bit more organic, with Planer stating that he was doing a play in 1976 with Richardson, and that: "He came out of an improvisation one night in Peter’s lorry when we thought we might need an interstitial to cover a scene change."
Planer's life story up until that point had mirrored Neil's quite a lot, and while Planer surprisingly regarded the character, pre-series, as "weak and unfunny" he also conceded of Neil that: "He comes from me and all my own flaws. An alter ego. [...] It’s like dumping all the faulty bits of yourself into a depository in order to make the most unlikeable, scuzzy, selfish, useless character you can. The weird thing was that people found Neil lovable. Strange paradox."
Another observation of Planer's was as a form of back-handed compliment to Ben Elton: "Perhaps a key to Ben's success lay in his ability to simplify nuance, to make crude and obvious what may have been subtle and ambiguous. This is a very useful skill to have if you want to write jokes. To take the piss out of a stereotype, you first of all have to establish it. And initially, I suspected that he might have done this to some extent when writing dialogue for the character of Neil - pinning down the un-pinnable and turning Neil two-dimensional. But I soon realised he'd actually made Neil inhabitable; it was up to me to provide the authenticity, the tone, the look."
Of the other characters added, then interestingly Lise Mayer didn't regard Vyvyan as the much-touted "punk" that people saw him as, stating on the commentary track to Cash that: "They all say everyone always thought that Vyvyan was a punk, whereas he wasn't, he was just supposed to have taken all the violent elements from heavy metal, punk and everything else and combined them." (Mayer also states in the Bambi commentary that the name came from the fact that she used to live in Vyvyan Terrace in Bristol.)
As well as the commentaries with production and crew, a couple of the commentary tracks involve other personnel. The start of Sick has Suggs from Madness share his memories, while the whole of Boring has video editor Ed Wooden talking through it. Joining him in the commentary booth is BluRay producer Richard Latto, who gets to verbally prod Ed along.
Boring has a high level of thematic brilliance, where the four main characters are surrounded by everything from UFOs to visitations from Hell, but are completely unaware of it. It also goes the furthest in satirical attacks on the police, producing a moment that's cut out on repeats and some DVD releases: the racist policeman.
With a policeman delivering a series of racist invective, it goes somewhat shockingly far when watched today. (Ed Wooden: "I thought at the time: 'this is very near the knuckle'.") The Young Ones was a spearhead work of the new "non-sexist, non-racist" comedy troupe, but what's always surprising is that what is regarded as "PC" and radical today can be seen as reactionary and offensive tomorrow. This is an episode with an Irish-accented potato, while other episodes will see variations on the words "sp*z" and "poof". There's some slight satirical intent in both, but it would be unlikely to play well to modern audiences.
So, Boring. The greatest episode of The Young Ones, at least according to this article. It contains wit, invention, but, perhaps most importantly of all, it has something to say.