Page 17 of Time Out, 15th to 21st October 1982:
YOUNG, TWISTED AND DAFT
A Monty Python for the 1980s? The Likely Lads meet Bunuel?
Frank Barrett reports on a new BBC sit-comm.
What The Goons did to the 1950s and Monty Python achieved in the 1970s, 'The Young Ones' - a new BBC comedy series starting this month - looks set to do for the 1980s. It might seem premature to label it as a cult but those at the BBC involved in its production and others who have seen it are confident that the programme will rapidly become compulsive viewing.
The six-part sit-com is the joint effort of a group of young comedians who have made their name in the alternative comedy cabaret 'The Comic Strip'. The series is co-written by Rik Mayall, half of the Twentieth Century Coyote act and already seen on TV as his alter ego Kevin Turvey, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer. The main performers are Mayall, Nigel Planer, half of the Outer Limits act, Ade Edmondson, the other half of Twentieth Century Coyote, Chris Ryan, currently starring in 'Can't Pay? Won't Pay!', and Alexei Sayle, probably the best known of the group through his appearances in the ill-fated 'OTT'.
Happily, the basic story line of 'The Young Ones' is less complicated than its writing and performing credits. The plot ostensibly concerns four students - where and what they study isn't revealed - in a squalid North London flat. The content of 'The Young Ones' is a compelling mixture of anarchic humour and surrealism - a sort of cross between Bunuel and the Likely Lads.
Alexei Sayle, for example, appears as several (mostly aggressive) characters in the East European family of the students' landlord but he often breaks out of character to deliver one of his famous (aggressive) routines. There are also asides in the programmes - one of which, for example, studies the life of a dustbug in the groove of a Cliff Richard record - while music is also a regular feature of the programme with appearances by bands such as Madness, Nine Below Zero and Dexy's Midnight Runners.
'The Young Ones' (the title is an ironic reference to Cliff and another swipe at the Swingin' '60s) was originally devised by Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer. Mayall is 24 and a graduate of Manchester University where he studied drama; Mayer, 21, met Mayall through her father Professor Mayer, who was Mayall's drama tutor at Manchester. The two took 'The Young Ones' idea to Ben Elton, a fellow Comic Strip performer and another Manchester graduate. The three of them produced a pilot script which was designed to draw on the talents of fellow artistes in the Comic Strip (some of whom had also been to Manchester University).
The script was performed to BBC producer Paul Jackson, 34, who had worked with Comic Strip people on a short-lived series with the compact title of 'Boom Boom, Out go the Lights'. Jackson made a pilot show and persuaded his less than enthusiastic superiors to approve a series of six programmes. Anyone familiar with the content of Comic Strip comedy might understand why the more conservative elements of the BBC hierarchy demonstrated a certain lack of enthusiasm: jokes about tampons, masturbation and breaking wind caused anxiety among executives who have now also had to sanction expressions which may be common in colloquial student speech but are less often heard on television.
One of the other problems troubling the BBC is how they're going to bill 'The Young Ones' in the Radio Times and elsewhere. 'Wacky' and 'zany' are labels which make the cast cringe. 'You can't explain it,' says Mayall. 'It's a modern video comedy which attempts to cross sit-com and variety with a surreal story.'
Knowing that the success of 'The Young Ones' could lead eventually to Pythonesque superstardom, when asked if the series will become will become a cult the cast exchange nervous grins. Mayall remains straightfaced but wistful. 'I hope so,' he says, 'I hope so...'
Pages 18 and 19 of City Limits, 4th to 10th May 1984:
REALLY HEAVY!
This week a nose picking punk who doesn't like doors, a middle class 'politico' Cliff Richard fan, a bewildered spiv, an enraged landlord with a lot of cousins who look just like him, and a morose hippy whose lentil soup inevitably gets thrown at the wall will all scream at each other for half an hour on TV. JOHN CONNOR talks to the creators of 'The Young Ones'.
Vivien: 'I think I'll put my head through this wall. There. I did.'
A YEAR and a half ago, I and about two million other people, sat down to watch a comedy programme about four students, their shared house and their foreign landlord.
By the end of the six week run, the house had been demolished in a variety of interesting and creative ways, the four students had become household characters, and five million people were regularly watching it. The repeats did even better.
'The Young Ones' became a popular cult hit in just one series. With a TV viewing figure even 'Monty Python' and the more recent 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' failed to achieve so quickly.
In its wake 'The Comic Strip' launched to mixed reviews in Channel 4, paradoxically with many of the same performers. Predictably, several other shows of indifferent appeal have crept into the schedules of the TV companies.
In many ways this comedy movement echoes the events of the sixties, when the Oxbridge inspired satire boom launched upon an unsuspecting world in November 1962 with 'That Was The Week That Was'. Exactly two decades later, 'The Young Ones' burst - or more appropriately smashed - their way across our television screens.
RUBBISH BAG
It all started in the now forgotten ripples of the new wave of comedy that itself developed in the wake of the punk movement.
The idea that anybody could get up and play music transferred just as well to anyone getting up and cracking jokes. In 1979, when the American idea of a Comedy Store was tried out in a Soho strip club, it hit exactly the right note for the time.
Posterity will no doubt refer to this as the start of the 'alternative' comedy boom.
Interestingly enough its epicentre was just around the corner from the site of Peter Cook's original '60s satire club, the Establishment. If there is such a thing as a comedy cycle - its wheel had turned full circle.
It was BBC producer Paul Jackson who first put together a 'Comedians' style montage of cabaret stalwarts in a TV show: 'Boom Boom Out Go The Lights'. During the recording Rik Mayall first broached the idea about a weird sitcom he and Lise Mayer had thought up one drunken evening.
At the time The Comic Strip's stage show was at the height of its success and there had been a good reaction to the two 'Boom Boom's'. Jackson went off to cajole the BBC. Rik and Lise, after inviting Ben Elton - an old friend from Rik's Manchester University Drama Department days - went off and wrote the pilot.
So besides a quantity of alcohol what else prompted the idea for 'The Young Ones'?
Rick: 'You're all so incredibly unbelievably stupid!'
Rik and Lise, over a cup of tea in their classically ornamented Islington flat, think on.
'Well we were sitting around talking about the Rick stage character,' Lise recalls, 'and just reminiscing about university. Saying, "I bet he's the sort of person who made everyone in the house put their milk bottle tops in a different rubbish bag, and then never actually sent it to the people who collect milk bottle tops."
'Then we started thinking about other characters.'
The other characters they came up with were all based on performers they knew down at The Comic Strip.
For 'The Young Ones' Alexei Sayle ended up being very Sayle; Nigel Planer transferred his hippy stage character Neil; Vivien was specially designed for Rik's double act partner Ade Edmondson, and the last character, Mike, was originally written with Peter Richardson in mind. When that didn't work out it went to audition and was secured by an actor, Christopher Ryan.
So out of five leads only one wasn't a stand up comic. But they were all men. Why no women characters?
'Well,' Rik admits, 'that has been a criticism levelled at the programme. But we weren't just writing parts - we were writing specifically for people we had in mind.'
'And at the time,' says Lise, 'Dawn and Jennifer (French & Saunders) weren't around and we didn't know any female comedians. It's also in the reality of people like that - that none of them would share a flat with a girl. I mean it's very much one of those all-male households that you get at university.
'And we made it students, not just because we'd been students, but because it would have been a lot more dodgy if they were young unemployed - since they're always being really horrible about people. So we put them into what's a privileged position to begin with.
'What we're basically attacking is the "me" generation. If you listen, they never really have conversations. They just talk about themselves all the time.
'Then there's all the hippy ideas. The only thing that's seemed to survive from all that is that if you're over 30, forget it. Then you see what being a selfish bastard with spots all over his face.'
And how does the Cliff Richard connection come into it?
'The Rick character has always had an obsession - it used to be Vanessa Redgrave - and now it's Cliff,' says Mayall. 'Liking Cliff was originally to show that Rick was a wanker. It's taken on more emphasis now because of the idea of attacking youth. In the show there's
Neil: 'I think I'll just go and kill myself. Right. I'm going to.'
someone from the fifties, the sixties, the seventies and the eighties. And you've got Cliff who's been there all the time and is still the eternal youth, the Peter Pan if you like.
'And,' he adds mischievously, 'we're going to bring out a Young Ones book you know - entitled "Bachelor Boys".'
In the end though, whatever the theme of the show, its success lies in its anarchic style.
What 'The Young Ones' has done is revolutionise TV sitcoms in the same way 'Monty Python' revolutionised the TV sketch show. Yet the original idea was a simple one: to put something on television that Mayall and Lise Mayer wanted to see themselves and that had that same air of exciting 'uncertainly' as 'Monty Python'.
'With "The Young Ones", by showing that almost anything in the house can be alive, you can go anywhere - through the window, the roof, the walls,' says Mayall. 'And you've got all these characters who are trying to get through a story. Or stories' happening that they're all ignoring. You've got almost that same feeling as the Pythons that anything can happen. And that excitement is, I think, one of the most satisfying things fro an audience.'
FIRE-BOMB
Having watched the first episode of the second series being recorded - replete with much audience amusement when Ade Edmondson nearly set fire to the bed he was lying in during a petrol bomb sequence - it's fair to say that the style 'The Young Ones' has developed hasn't just got progressively weirder, it's also become very slick. Rik accurately sums it up:
'It now looks like people who are good at making subversive television, rather than people who are new to television looking subversive.'
Now that they've succeeded in producing a popular show, without compromising the ideas they had in The Comedy Store, what happens next?
'Perhaps this series is the last because we're not young ones anymore,' Rik muses, 'and for the first time we're beginning to think of something else... better.'
'People,' Lise adds, ' are going off in different versions. There's talk of a stage show. That's the next one we've got to hit - the West End. The next bastion.'
Currently what The Young Ones seem most glad about is that, now the BBC scene shifters dispute is over, the last two episodes of the new series will be made after all.
'The last is a devastatingly important programme,' Rik says deadpan. 'It's called "Summer Holiday".'
'The Young Ones' put their foot though the screen on BBC2 at 9.00 this Tuesday.
Alexei: 'My cousin likes men in uniforms you berks.'
Page 12 of the
Times, Friday 11th May 1984:
moreover...
Miles Kington
AUNTIE AND THE YOUNG ONES GO A REVELLING
A new trend is abroad which has not yet been noticed. It's called not-knocking-the-BBC. Yes, the early part of 1984 was deafened by the outcry against the Beeb and because our ears are still ringing with the sound, we haven't noticed that it has stopped. The Thorn Birds is forgotten; the ratings battle is not drawing the crowds it used to; The Jewel In The Crown can no longer be waved in the BBC's face; and it's months since Max Hastings last lambasted the upper reaches of the Corporation.
Much of what Max said was true, as the middle reaches were quick to agree, but there seemed to be a feeling that once Aubrey Singer had been sacrificed to the gods, things could go quiet again - why, I don't believe I've heard Sixty Minutes criticized for more than a week. And as the smoke of battle cleared, the damage on the battleground was much less than supposed.
The BBC may still find it hard to get programmes in the Top Ten, but when you look at most of the ITV programmes that pull in the crowds, you wonder if anyone seriously wants to be in the Top Ten. Furthermore, if a week in which the BBC got 47 per cent of the audience can be described as a very bad week for them, you wonder what they have to do to be called good. If the Tories got 47 per cent in a popularity poll, who would call it bad?
The fashion for slamming the BBC was in large part just that - a fashion. We love slamming something, but we need to move target. Channel 4 was getting it in the neck last year, and is now agreed to be putting on very good stuff, even if it hasn't got its sums right. Then TV-am fell flat on its face and got the rotten tomatoes, though it seems to be matching the BBC pretty well now.
So it was time that the Beeb came in for its fair share of mud-slinging and it has, on the whole, got away quite lightly. You wait and hear the howls of derision that will greet early cable TV. Just you wait and hear.
Meanwhile, the BBC has had the luck to chalk up a few recent successes. David Attenborough's The Living Planet was every bit as good as Life on Earth - and producing a good sequel is the hardest trick of all. (If he wants a title for another series looking at our deteriorating environment, I can offer him something I saw written on a car engine the other day: Negative Earth.) For a fortnight they have given us wall-to-wall snooker, the nearest thing to perfect television ever devised. And now they have started a new series of The Young Ones.
Right from the start of the first series I was quite convinced that this is the best, brightest, most inspired TV comedy since Monty Python. Also the funniest. They have latched on to the simple yet hard truth about comedy: that if you have a solid story line and a cast of clearly drawn characters, you can be as crazy as you like. The Goon Show knew that. Soap knew that. Not many others do. So, although The Young Ones is ostensibly about four ill-matched students in one house, they can without strain introduce a hamster talking broad Scots, the contents of the fridge bursting into song and - a magnificent conceit, this - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse going mad with boredom and getting nothing from God in answer to their prayers but endless sets of Travel Scrabble. In an effort to emphasize how original the series is and how much better than anything else around, people keep telling us that it is wonderfully anarchic and without precedent. Anarchic is precisely what it isn't: the scripts by Elton, Mayall and Mayer are beautifully controlled and constructed. Without precedent? Nearly, yes, but there is one parallel from nearly 25 years ago which keeps nudging my memory: the radio versions of Hancock's Half-Hour.
That programme, like The Young Ones, put four or five egocentric monsters in the same house and let them get on with their fantasies, with the lamest of excuses for being there. None of the pseudo-sociological background that cripples most sitcom ("John is a single parent with a child who has recently moved in with his divorced father, next door to his mother.."), simply a huge delight in making outsize egos bump into each other, watching the sparks fly and entering a realm of invention which few comedies even suggest. Twenty-five years hence parents will be saying, "Ah, but you should have seen The Young Ones ... on the BBC," they might add. So was Hancock , come to think of it.
From the
Financial Times, Saturday 18th May 1985:
The lure of surreal squalor
NEARLY FIVE million people are staying in on Monday evenings to watch Rick, Vivian, Neil and Mike talk about "botty-belches" and call each other "complete bastards." The Young Ones is being repeated on BBC2 (not Channel Four, as you might expect) and, barring freak snooker finals, is getting the highest rating of any programme on an outlet more usually renowned for documentaries, wild life films and efforts of a more sober nature.
A comedy show about an unpleasant group of students living in surreal squalor obviously is likely to appeal to students, but its attraction has been much greater than a college "cult show." This must partly be because 'the Kids," as Rick would refer to them, cannot quite believe that anyone actually has been permitted to break wind on BBC2, and anxiously switch on to see what else gets through. Yet, more and more older young ones seems to be enjoying the series this time round, and a staggering 800,000 people forked out for a copy of the spin-off book.
With this sort of success, the show is almost heading into the mainstream. Not quite, though. There are still plenty of people who are delighted that no more episodes of The Young Ones are to be made.
They never found reference to Felicity Kendal's knickers acceptable: nor did they find remotely funny the idea, say, of an animated sock escaping from a foetid laundry bag and having to be executed.
I always did, and I think that the decision of the BBC to put on the series was an enlightened move rather than the end of civilisation as we know it. Critics of the programme, like most critics of humor, and much use of adjectives like "juvenile" and "puerile" and "childish." It is all of these things, of course, but how exactly does "adult" humour work? If so much humour is to be dismissed as fourth form, or fifth form, or sixth form, or undergraduate, then we are to be left with only with some sort of mature humour. I have visions of old men in leather chairs smiling wryly at Victorian editions of Punch.
It is not, however, only the outrage - the feeling of watching a comedy video nasty - that is so entertaining about The Young Ones. That does not really do justice to the fact that, although it is a bizarre situation comedy, it works through the strength of the characters. The plots include unexploded nuclear devices appearing in the kitchen, devils dropping in from Hell for the day, or the students appearing on University Challenge; odd interludes feature vegetables talking, washing machines refusing to wash laundry, or giant cream buns descending. But the main interest and the compelling comedy lie in how the students react both to these things and to each other.
With the possible exception of the "smoothie" character, Mike, The Young Ones characterisation is superb. The average sitcom might have come up with a punk and a hippy but no one would have come up with Rick, the Cliff Richard fan-cum-anarchist-poet-cum-poseur. On closer acquaintance, both thep unk and the hippy are so extreme as to be, in fact, completely individual. Sitcom punks usually have green hair and say "Hello, Mum" at the breakfast table whereas Vivian (the punk in The Young Ones) sets fire to mattresses, cuts off his fingers, gets decapitated in a train and then kicks his own head along the tracks.
Neil is not only a peaceful hippy but he is a terminally depressed one. Added to this, he is incompetent and feeble. These two react to the self-obsessed Rick with an absurd yet convincing logic. Neil is a hippy and should therefore do all the work in the house from answering the phone to cooking the supper; he fails to do this and is abused by the others, particularly Rick. Meanwhile, Rick gets carried away with his own voice, talking about Thatcher or fascism of the Kids, and can be distracted only by extreme violence from Vivian.
These characters are, however, anally-fixated and foul - difficult to defend against people who do not appreciate foul-mouthed, anally fixated comedy. I can plead only that The Young Ones is different from other sitcoms. It's funny.
Ian Hislop
Given the passion that he describes as having for the series one can't help but wonder if, at some point during the eighteen years (so far) of
Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop ever turned to Paul Merton and said, "Look, it's all very well you making whimsical comments about politicians wearing jetpacks and stuff, but have you got any interesting reminiscences about the
Time location shoot...".
