About Me
MySpace Profile Photo Editor A mad, helter-skelter, rude, awesomely violent, unpredictable, swaggering, staggering, joyously infantile, exhilarating steamroller of a sitcom, The Young Ones provided the breakthrough for the new generation of aggressive and forthright 'alternative' comedians.By 1981, certain members of the 'alternative comedy' movement were beginning to turn up on television. Rik Mayall had arguably the highest profile and at least a little leverage with television producers. On stage, he had perfected an off-the-wall poet character, Rik, a pompous, radical prat whom he had brought to TV in Boom Boom...Out Go The Lights Mayall and his then-girlfriend Lise Mayer talked about the sort of home life such a bloke might have, and what other characters might live with him. Firstly they thought of 'Adrian Dangerous', the mad, fearless, self-abusing, heavy-metal-loving lunatic punk that Ade Edmondson portrayed opposite Mayall's Richard Dangerous alter ego in the Dangerous Brothers routine that was a popular part of their stage act. Then there was Nigel Planer's brainless, hippy character 'Neil' (who had also appeared in Boom Boom...Out Go The Lights). Finally, they envisaged for Peter Richardson a shifty, slightly mysterious and overwhelmingly 'normal' character.With a quartet formed in his mind, Mayall saw the potential for a sitcom series and took the idea to TV producer Paul Jackson, who thought it was worth a try. But Jackson and Richardson had clashed over Boom Boom... so Richardson was dropped (he went off to develop The Comic Strip Presents... and, after casting around for a replacement, Christopher Ryan was found in his stead. Mayall, Mayer and Ben Elton wrote the scripts, with Mayall and Mayer working as a team and Elton alone; the two elements had to be combined for every script, Elton later saying that this method accounted for the show's lack of discipline which, perversely, greatly added to its appeal. The writers decided to call their series The Young Ones.The premise was simple: the series depicted a flatshare from hell, with four anarchic, lazy, dysfunctional students living on the breadline and hating and abusing one another. But it was the style of The Young Ones rather than the idea that gave the show its individuality. It gloriously reflected the free-basing, high-octane, in-your-face, unpredictable quality of 'alternative' comedy and turned its back on all of the old, established rules and clichés of television humour to present 35 minutes of rampaging, violent slapstick which had more in common with Warner Bros cartoons than with situation comedy as known to this point. A huge range of bizarre ideas was tethered to the loosest possible storylines and confusion was deliberately added by sudden cutaways to characters and situations not involved in the plot. The show also had musical guests - a first for a sitcom - whose appearances somehow had to be accommodated within the story. Whatever its merits or shortcomings, The Young Ones certainly succeeded in looking different, and that was half the battle won. The 'establishment', at first, was horrified and reviled in equal measure.What is The Young Ones?The Young Ones is a British-made television sitcom made in 1982 and 1984,
about four totally mis-matched students sharing a house together in the
early 1980s.But like all classic television programmes, it transcended its' roots to
become the classic British comedy series of the early 1980s, helping to
launch the then-alternative comedy scene into mainstream TV culture.Like Monty Python in the 1960s and The Goodies in the 1970s, it
occasionally went into surreal sketches and characters that retained a
vague, at best link to the main narrative.Almost every significant "alternative" British comedian of the late 1980s
and 1990s were featured in The Young Ones, either on screen or behind the
scenes. People such as Chris Barrie, Robbie Coltrane, Ben Elton, Dawn
French, Stephen Fry, Hale & Pace, Lenny Henry, Hugh Laurie, Norman Lovett,
Griff Rhys Jones, Tony Robinson, Jennifer Saunders, Mel Smith, and
two-time Oscar winner Emma Thompson got their first starts on television
through The Young Ones.
