I mean, The Young Ones - well, it all sounds very good, doesn't it?
But just look around you - it's trash!
I am an antichrist... #
It's 1978, and the Sex Pistols are gobbing on everyone in range.
Punk is taking Britain by storm and, for the first time since
the hippies ten years earlier, revolution is in the air.
Kids everywhere are kicking against the Establishment,
and Johnny Rotten is an antichrist, not a celebrity.
Everything seemed possible the year before Mrs Thatcher arrived to put
a stop to all that and this is where the story of The Young Ones starts.
I'm on board the freedom bus, heading for Good Time City
and I haven't even paid my fare!
At Manchester University, drama student Rik Mayall
was inspired by the spirit of punk to drop the "C" from his name
and team up with fellow student Adrian Edmondson,
performing with comedy group 20th Century Coyote.
The whole idea of anything straight was a joke.
The idea of wanting to go on television? I don't think so!
After graduating from uni,
Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson went to London's Soho,
where news was getting out about a new club called the Comedy Store.
It put a drawing pin in the cushion of mainstream comedy provided
by Tarby, Monky and O'Connor...y.
Rik and Ade formed their own double act and jumped straight in.
The Comedy Store was a breeding ground
for the next generation of talent, a brat pack of funsters.
Inspired by its success,
Peter Richardson persuaded his partner Nigel Planer
and other new wave comedians
to open a new club above Raymond's Revuebar in Soho.
So it was that the Comic Strip was launched,
starring Richardson and Planer... Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson...
the female duo Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French...
and a loud-mouthed shiny-suited Bolshevik called Alexei Sayle.
Yaki-Da, Yaki-Da, Yaki-Da!
Fantastic moment in time. Suddenly there was this place
where everybody could do things like that.
People were generally obsessed with writing new material for next week,
trying new stuff out and, um...
most of it was shit.
But the comedy clubs became a huge success with London's Time Out crowd
and soon attracted BBC interest, not from the comedy bosses
but further down the food chain -
a fledgling producer called Paul Jackson.
I think, the first night, I saw Alexei.
I certainly saw Rik and Ade performing as 20th Century Coyote.
I saw Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson, and I loved it.
I really thought, "This is fantastic, this is different."
It really made me laugh. I went back a couple of times.
Second or third time, I had a drink with them
and said, "Is anyone from TV talking to you guys?"
Although not long out of assistant floor management,
Paul Jackson was the someone from television
who managed to get these bright, new comedians onto the screen
in a 1980 show called...
Boom boom! Out go the lights!
This marked the official debut of alternative comedy on television
as Rik, Ade, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson
performed some of the characters
they'd been developing at the Comic Strip.
You've been playing like this for some time? Anything wrong, officer?
COULD be.
It was also the TV audience's first exposure
to Britain's most notorious students. What's your name?
Neil. Neil.
R-I-K Rik's character, Rick, R-I-C-K,
was based on aspects of his own personality.
That was one of his skills - finding his inner monstrous qualities
and turning them into comedy creations.
Right, my name's Rik, OK?
LAUGHTER
Shut up.
It was also based on someone that he had seen
in the Fringe Club at the Edinburgh Festival
who stood up and started declaiming poetry
and got very angry when people laughed or didn't pay attention.
"Whenever I'm near ta the thea-ta, I..."
Shut up! And the character was sort of born out of that.
Um, hello. Nigel had a character called Neil.
This number's sort of about a big depression that I had,
sort of half an hour ago.
He talked about all the tropical diseases he'd got
when he'd taken the Magic Bus to India.
Which was, in fact, what had happened to Nigel.
When I'm do-o-o-own
You kick me further
Further on...down... #
Ade Edmondson appeared as the more violent half
of a double act with Rik, called the Dangerous Brothers.
My name's Richard Dangerous, and this is Adrian Dangerous.
And Alexei Sayle appeared as a sort of people's poet.
Hello, John, got a new motor? Hello, John, got a new motor?
It was on the back of that, having looked at that and thought,
"We've seen our acts on telly now."
But it didn't make very exciting telly.
It wasn't as exciting as in the Comedy Store and the Comic Strip.
You just couldn't get the excitement of live performance on television.
I suddenly thought, "It would be a bloody good idea,
"it would be great, if all these guys lived together!"
One night at home, Rik and his then girlfriend Lise Mayer
cobbled together the first ever script of The Young Ones.
The first script I saw, with coffee cup marks on it,
was a bit sprawling, it lacked discipline in its presentation.
And I'd said this to Rik, but not with any particular vehemence.
I'd said, "We need to shape this up a bit."
He came to me later and said, "Do you mind if I bring in another writer?"
I said, "No. Who is he? Why?"
I needed someone to churn out the gear.
I'd have the ideas, some laughs, and so would Lise,
but I needed someone to churn out the gear.
Someone to say, "No, no. Yeah, yeah." And so I phoned up Ben.
Ben Elton also studied at Manchester University,
two years below Rik and Ade on the same drama course.
He also had a job on a production line, bashing out plays.
Rik had seen my plays at university, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,
and he rang me up and said, "We've got a chance
to do something. Paul Jackson, a producer at the BBC,
has asked us to produce a pilot of anything. Want to come in on it?"
What happened next could best be described as "creative differences".
The upshot was that Peter Richardson decided
his talents wouldn't be put to best use in The Young Ones.
So alongside Rik, Vyvyan and Neil,
the part of Mike was taken by Christopher Ryan.
Paul Jackson was excited by the pilot,
but would those TV bosses be equally impressed?
They didn't get it, it's fair to say. Nobody quite knew what it was.
I loved it. I was thrilled with it. It was what we had set out to do.
I remember walking away with my arm around Ben,
thinking - I don't know if I said it or not -
"I don't care if nobody likes this because I think it's fantastic!"
Even so, The Young Ones could have been drowned at birth.
But Paul Jackson had a point to prove.
I'd shown this tape to the man who was in charge
of Youth Programming at the BBC at the time, Mike Boland.
I'd gone to a youth conference with Mike and I had shown him this tape.
Mike got it straightaway. "It's fabulous. I love this!"
A couple of months later, he's poached by Channel 4 to run Entertainment.
And of course very smartly, and absolutely correctly,
he goes and contacts these people,
'cause he knows the BBC's not doing anything with them.
And he discovered, Pete Richardson, I think that Rik
was still very committed to The Young Ones, was still hoping it would happen.
But he got hold of Pete and Rich and French and Saunders
by this time had emerged as part of the group,
and he gave them a series, which was The Comic Strip.
In fact, the first ever Comic Strip went out
on the first night of Channel 4 - Five Go Mad In Dorset.
The Comic Strip Presents starred not only Peter Richardson,
Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Robbie Coltrane,
and also Rik, Ade and Nigel.
It finally rang a bell.
The BBC bosses said, "Hang on, those are those blokes on the tape."
And they phoned me up and said,
"Can you get the other five shot quick enough to beat Channel 4 on air?"
In fact, we didn't. We went on just before...
We went on within a week of Channel 4 opening, with our full six.
Channel 4 only had the one Comic Strip.
We got our full six on air and that was our first series.
Once in every lifetime
Comes a love like this
I need you, you need me
Oh, my darling, can't you see... #
When the first episode went out...
When something's broadcast, it's not like watching a video.
"It's on telly!
"I can't believe it!" And, er...I was aware that we were creating a stir.
It's a revolution!
Hi, kids!
'What was good about the characters in The Young Ones was
that although they were massively overblown,'
they did have a root in truth.
I mean, we'd all just been students fairly recently
and the characters that you meet at university,
particularly Rik, the sort of desperate wannabe lefty
who's actually deeply reactionary at heart
and the minute he graduates will immediately revert to type...
You'll be hearing from my solicitor! I'm going to write to my MP.
You haven't got an MP. You're an anarchist.
Ah...I shall write to the lead singer of Echo And The Bunnymen!
Vyv! Eat the telly!
The sort of "I hate everything and I'm gonna eat it" character,
which is Vyvyan. You do see those at university.
I'm sure you see them everywhere.
CHURCH BELLS Shut up, you bastards! It's only 11 o'clock! Oh, wow!
Oh, heavy, heavy, heavy!
Another house-mate given to labelling his lentils was Nigel Planer's Neil,
who'd lost his hat since Boom Boom, but still had suicidal tendencies.
I thought you were dead! Well, that's no reason to hassle me on the toilet!
When Rik and Vyvyan weren't terrorising Neil,
or killing each other, they spent their time looking up
to the short guy with the shades and the business plan, Mike.
Mike the cool person really was written for Peter Richardson,
the fourth person in the Comic Strip gang.
It was a great character, and Chris did an unbelievable job with it.
Get lost! I AM lost! That's why I'm here.
There's no chance of using your toilet, is there? No.
I thought not. That's why I pissed in your garden.
The other regular characters who came into the house via unorthodox means,
'were all played by Alexei Sayle.' Let me in, boys!
As the Balowski Family, he hijacked the programme every week.
Greetings from South Africa. AGH!
What am I now? Come on, quick, quick! A pain in the arse.
Alexei's style of delivery and type of humour
wasn't really the same as Rik and Ade's.
BELL TINKLES
Excuse me, is this the cheese shop? No, sir.
That's that sketch knackered then, innit?
Although he was part of the movement,
his career sort of went off on a different way from the rest.
They all talk about me behind my back.
I hate him. He drinks like a fish.
He's got no talent. Alexei who?
So I think, probably, that is a sign of the fact
that he wasn't really as integrated as the rest were with the scene.
If Alexei Sayle seemed an alien invader,
it may have been because the other four were a classic tight-knit group.
As word got round about The Young Ones,
and millions of kids discovered the existance of BBC 2,
the show started attracting the fanatical support
that's usually reserved for rock bands.
Schoolyards buzzed with the exploits of Rick, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike,
and people started to read meanings into their relationship.
A lot of people likened The Young Ones to a family,
with Neil as the mum, and Mike as the dad,
and Rik and Ade as the naughty children -
Rik as the little girl.
It's incredible - I'm not a girl at all!
If they are a family, The Young Ones must be
the most dysfunctional, not to say homicidal, ever.
The show seemed to be smashing up all the rules of sitcom.
I'm sorry, Vyv.
That's OK, Neil. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
On the face of it, this was a completely different planet
to the one inhabited by Terry And June and The Good Life.
No! No! No! No!
We are not watching The flaming Good Life! Bloody, bloody, bloody!
Of course, it falls into the rules of sitcom,
because we had sets and characters and a situation.
Dad's Army is probably a more weirdly original idea.
I mean, ours was in a house, on a sofa!
Bloody hell!
No room for me on the sofa as usual! I have to sit on the rickety chair.
The fact that it was regularly set on fire or eaten by a hamster
doesn't really make any difference.
Christ! Bo-ring!
What it was saying was surreal, but it looked like an ordinary sitcom.
Look, Rik, it's only five minutes.
"Rik, it's only five minutes!" Tell that to Roger Bannister!
Roger, it's only five minutes! Oh, really? How interesting.
The surreal demands of The Young Ones
made it a dream for the special effects department.
Special effects loved you.
That's just typical!
You'd say, "I need a piano to fall through the floor."
"Yeah, sure! Tomorrow or this afternoon?"
These guys were fantastic. So we were playing, as we've always been.
Paul Jackson said to us,
"Don't worry about the budget, let me worry about the budget.
Just write anything you want to write."
Rik would bring a certain hint of madness,
a certain understanding about what the actors could do
and what the stage acts were about.
Neil, your bedroom's on fire!
I thought this was my bedroom!
Oh, no!
Lisa tended to bring the weirder stuff, the wilder stuff.
It's a bloody game, innit? What is?
Chess.
Mice and rats talking to each other.
Eaten any good books lately? 'I never liked the talking rats and things.'
It was OK, but I wasn't so into that side of it.
I liked Vyvyan's talking socks at the launderette.
Get back in the sack, sock! I'm not going back in there. It stinks!
If you can't keep control of your socks, you shan't be allowed any.
It was seat-of-the-pants stuff. That was how it had to be done.
Because without it, it wouldn't be the series.
When somebody says,
Sometimes I really wish I was a fly on the wall.
We cut to a fly crawling up the wall.
Who are you?
We're just the fly-on-the-wall documentary film crew, OK?
We're just making a short film about
what it is really like to be a fly-on-the-wall.
It was our desire to do this in front of an audience for shock value.
The audience would see people cutting off their fingers
and seeing the spurts of blood. So it all had to work.
Brilliant, eh?
Oh, dear.
Wrong finger.
Then it was further complicated by the fact that Paul Jackson told us that
if we did it in variety rather than in comedy, we got a bigger budget.
So to qualify for variety, we thought we'd have a variety act every week.
The fact that there would be a band on each show got established,
and it added something to the show. We quite liked it.
House Of Fun - we were playing in a pub,
The Kebab And Calculator.
Good morning, miss Can I help you, son? #
And I utter the immortal line,
You hum it, I'll smash your face in.
"You hum it, I'll smash your face in."
Funnily enough, people still stop me in the street,
and if I had become a stand-up comedian,
that possibly would have been my catch phrase but unfortunately
I never made it that far.
MUSIC!
We were able to pick our own bands, which was great. We had Motorhead.
Wherever you are, Lemmy... Hi.
The Young Ones became a huge hit.
And its fans weren't just confined to the kids
and the special effects department.
The music's too loud! The neighbours have been complaining.
The most surprising thing for us was
that it was very popular with the police.
We had seen it as kind of politically left-wing.
The bathroom's free! Unlike the country, under the Thatcherite junta.
Anti-police...
That's white man's electricity you're burning, ringing that bell.
That's theft. I've got your number so hold out your hand.
Officer, I represent Kellogg's Cornflakes car competition.
Oh, sorry, John. I thought you was a nigger.
Every time any of us would come across anyone in the police force,
they would say, "We all love it! It's our favourite show.
We're always playing it down the police station."
The Young Ones, in its first series, did exactly what we hoped it would.
It became clear to us really pretty quickly
that it was becoming a cult amongst the audience it was targeted at.
Clearly it was targeted at a young audience.
Although I didn't set out to make a cult show,
the intention was that your mum would hate it.
Like rock'n'roll, you didn't want parents to like it.
You wanted them to be worried you were watching it.
It's a bloody outrage. It's a waste of the licensing fee.
When series one of The Young Ones ended in December 1982,
it had become so popular that it was repeated inside six months.
And another series was immediately commissioned.
But now it was the BBC who had to wait, because The Young Ones team
were everything Rik Mayall had dreaded only four years earlier -
successful and famous.
Nigel Planer had gone over to the other side
to play the Mike-lile character Lou Lewis in Shine On Harvey Moon.
And as Neil, he released a cover version of Hole In My Shoe,
which went to number two in the charts.
In 1983, he and the rest of the cast
toured a stage version of The Young Ones.
Ben Elton co-wrote Alfresco, an ITV sketch show,
where he also tried his hand at acting,
with the bright young things from the Cambridge Footlights.
You haven't spoken.
Well, sir, I know some of the fellows think I'm cock-eyed. Perhaps I am.
But I'm the only chap in this room
who can look in two different directions at the same time.
Charlie?
Alfresco may not have been a hit, but Ben Elton added acting to his CV,
and duly turned up in the eagerly-awaited second series of The Young Ones.
We've been picked to go on University Challenge tonight!
The first show of series two,
and probably the best-remembered of all The Young Ones episodes,
pitted our radical alternative comedians
against Ben Elton's posh new best friends.
We're going to smash the oiks!
In the second series, we were lucky enough to win a BAFTA,
and the BAFTA-winning episode was Bambi,
so called because of Bamber Gascoigne, the host then, of University Challenge.
Welcome to another edition of University Challenge.
Interestingly, these new red-brick alternative comics
had very quickly started to meet
the then generation of the Cambridge Revue people.
What is the chemical equation...?
I've got a Porsche.
Ah...ah...ah... #
If the first series of The Young Ones caused a bit of a stir,
the second was a smack to the bland face of comedy on TV,
followed by a mugging.
The cult audience of the first series
swelled to mainstream proportions.
The Young Ones was a huge success because it wasn't just about students.
If you were young in 1980s Britain, you knew a Rik or Vyvyan or Neil.
Neil, how are you keeping that plant pot up?
Everyone who watched The Young Ones can quote lines from it,
often doing the voices, unfortunately,
and everyone has a favourite scene.
Open up, it's the pigs!
Knob end!
Oh, Vyvyan! What repartee! Sticks and stones may break my bones!
That is the first sensible thing you have said all day!
My favourite moment is Vyvyan doing the thing on the train.
They go on the train to get to the studio,
and Vyvyan is walking along the corridor and says,
"Why can't you stick your head out of a train window when it's moving?"
"Do not lean out of the window." I wonder why?
He sticks his head out and, of course...
AGH!
..another train comes and knocks his head off,
and he runs down the track kicking his head in front of him.
It was the clip we showed at BAFTA the night we won
and it's probably one of my favourite clips.
Over here!
Hurry up about it, will you?!
You took your time, you bastard!
At the end of the second series, we'd done 12.
Rik, particularly, but all of them, writers and performers,
had in their mind that there'd only been 12 Fawlty Towers.
So the basic idea was get out while you're winning.
I'm completely bloody sick of this!
The main reason for stopping was that we'd done everything we could.
It was about surprise and we couldn't surprise them any more
cos they'd be expecting surprise.
Hands up who likes me?
When the creative talents say that to you, you need to listen.
The BBC tried to get them to come back, but they were right.
The Young Ones had a phenomenal influence on British TV.
By 1986, the comedy map had been redrawn.
The old guard of Tarby and Brucie were relegated
to game shows and the golf course,
and new wave, alternative comedians moved into the mainstream.
Our young anarchists became the new television establishment.
After Harvey Moon, Nigel Planer went on to Roll Over Beethoven,
Chris Ryan appeared in a sitcom, A Small Problem,
while Rik and Ade regularly performed their double act the Dangerous Brothers
on a show that became the flagship of alternative comedy.
Saturday Live was produced by Paul Jackson
and featured a familiar shiny-suited compere.
British comedy is the best in the world.
British telly is its crowning glory. We've all seen Saturday Live.
Very funny. Fair enough.
In 1986 Ben Elton was brought in to co- write the second series of Blackadder.
Rik Mayall appeared in it as Lord Flashheart,
and The Young Ones reformed as a one-off for Comic Relief.
Their single, Living Doll, with Cliff Richard, went to number one.
A year later,
Rik, Nigel and Ade were reunited with Ben as writer
for six fleeting episodes of Filthy Rich And Catflap.
The Young Ones was a swipe at youth culture.
And lots more.
And then, we had a little bit of fame thrust on us
and so that's what we attacked next. It was showbiz.
Showbiz I'm in showbiz! #
Despite being a critical success,
the show only ran for one series, and has never been repeated.
I think there was a sort of, what a band would call musical differences.
There was some sort of shift in the creative power,
and so I think that's really the reason
why there weren't any further Filthy Rich And Catflaps.
It's just Rik and Ben going off in their own directions.
A shame for me, 'cause I fell through the middle.
Look, look, stop it, boys! Shut up, shut up.
After playing Richie Rich, Rik Mayall embraced the world of Thatch,
starring as Alan B'stard in The New Statesman.
Both he and Ade Edmondson appeared
in Blackadder Goes Forth, co-written by Ben Elton.
Rik and Ade returned to their drama roots in 1989,
for Waiting For Godot in the West End.
While Nigel Planer sent up luvviedom
as Nicholas Craig on BBC 2 in The Naked Actor.
In 1991, Rik and Ade brought their slapstick
to a new level of sophistication, as the TV show Bottom was born.
If you had the common decency to go out and get yourself a proper job,
and not hang around the flat like some vast slug,
then perhaps I would have the opportunity to take my top off,
and wash it without the risk of you seeing my nipples!
With Bottom, Rik and Ade returned
to the double act they'd developed as students,
and they'd been honing throughout their careers.
They'd been together so long, their relationship predated The Young Ones,
and it has post-dated The Young Ones.
I'm sure when they're 90, they'll still be doing jokes about bottoms,
and finding it very funny. As will everyone else.
In 1999, Rik and Ade brought their double act
to the big screen with a movie, Guesthouse Paradiso.
Undeterred by the critical bottom burp it received,
this year, Rik is back working with Peter Richardson,
on the feature film, Churchill - The Hollywood Years.
Nigel Planer, once again, has Ben Elton's words to speak.
One starring in, and the other writing, the Queen musical We Will Rock You.
Chris Ryan has appeared in several series of Absolutely Fabulous.
And Ade Edmondson has tried and failed to save the NHS in Doctors And Nurses.
But our four middle-aged Turks will always be remembered for their roles
in what can claim to be the most influential TV comedy of the last 25 years.
They're forever The Young Ones,
riding on the freedom bus with a one-way ticket to oblivion.
This is it! It's really happening!
One of the lovely things about doing The Young Ones was
I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time,
to have met very early in their careers
this group of people who so clearly were multi-talented.
We're all going on a summer holiday. #
I was just lucky enough to have walked into a room
where all these people were sitting, and nobody else was looking.
We can do exactly whatever we want to do! And do you know why?
Because we're Young Ones! Bachelor Boys!
Crazy, mad, wild-eyed, big-bottomed anarchists!
Look out!
Cliff!
There was no plan, except to have a good fucking time.
Mind my language. But I don't care, 'cause I'm a punk.
Now that's what I call anarchy!