On November 9th, 1982, an unsuspecting country was about to get an era-defining shock. A new comedy arrived on BBC Two, bringing a new generation with it. Rick (the late Rik Mayall), a sanctimonious sociology student, Vyvyan (Ade Edmondson), a violent punk, Neil (Nigel Planer), a morose hippy, and Mike (Christopher Ryan), a mysterious mature student, were undergraduates at Scumbag College. They lived in an indescribably filthy hovel owned by Alexei Sayle’s terrifying landlord, Jerzei Balowski, and traded in a brand of hyperstimulated slapstick hilarity that seemed to update Punch & Judy for the postpunk era.
A sitcom it was; Terry and June it definitely was not. The Young Ones broke the fourth wall, endangered the physical wellbeing of its stars and put cool bands on British telly. They terrorised “Footlights College Oxbridge” on University Challenge, released a single with Cliff Richard and had their own Sinclair ZX Spectrum video game. The show became a touchstone and an inflection point of 1980s British comedy, making superstars of its cast in the process. But how did it come about?
Lise Mayer (cocreator and cowriter): I met Rik when I was at Manchester High School. He was my dad’s student [at the university]. Obviously I liked him, but I didn’t think, This person will go far. He was naughty. I wanted to be an archaeologist. After university I had a travelling year and then came back to London. My friend told me about this new club that had started with Rik and a few others performing at it.
Alexei Sayle (Jerzei Balowski): The first time I met Rik and Ade was a night at [the Soho venue] the Comedy Store when I chose to do a really ill-advised piece of material. I was drunk as well, and there was a journalist in from the Observer so it seemed important. And I died really badly, so it was upsetting to see how funny they were!
We liked the idea that people would try and like these characters but that, every time they did, it would blow up in their face
Nigel Planer (Neil): I was doing a show with Peter Richardson from which Neil comes. It was where Neil was launched. We were a double act and we met Rik, Ade and Alexei in the Comedy Store. That was when the gang formed.
Sayle: When the Comedy Store opened it was kind of a circus, really. Rik and Ade started putting it on the path where it was noticeably different: it wasn’t just mad people; it was people with something identifiably different and identifiably good. And young.
Paul Jackson (producer and director): The Comedy Store became hot very quickly. When I got there, the queue was round the block. Not because it was successful but because you could only access the place in this terrible, rickety old lift, which could only take four people at a time. I actually felt that helped it get lift-off. You associated the queue with the Comedy Store.
Mayer: Paul Jackson was a young and thrusting producer. He’d done The Two Ronnies and quite a lot of mainstream stuff but he was interested in what was happening and he would come to the Comedy Store at a time when no one else did. Normal comedy was Footlights or musical stuff. He did a programme called Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights, which was Rik, Nigel and Alexei doing their standup acts on TV. They had to edit it so much that it lost the excitement of the live shows. Rik and I were talking about why it hadn’t worked and we decided that the only two formats that were made for television were the nature documentary and the sitcom. Rik said Ben [Elton] was good at writing plays and that he should join us.
Jackson: I thought the Comedy Store was wonderful. So I went back to my boss at the time, a man called Robin Nash, and said: “I think there’s something happening here.” I’d gone initially out of professional interest but I went back for pleasure.
Rather than just us doing our acts, it deconstructed the sitcom. It took a TV form and blew it apart in the way that we’d done to cabaret at the Comedy Store
Mayer: It very much felt like a punk thing. Instead of “Here’s three chords, now go and form a band” it was “Here’s a microphone, now go and be a standup comedian.”
Jackson: I got a pilot script from Rik. It was handwritten and had a coffee-cup mark on the first page, and I loved it. And Robin basically said: “Really, Paul? I’ve read it and I don’t understand. Are you sure this is what’s happening?” And I told him they were going to be big so we made a pilot. I saw the head of comedy in a corridor a few weeks later and they’d obviously been showing the pilot around and he said, “Don’t worry, Paul. Sometimes it doesn’t work…” But, around that time, Channel 4 was launching, and they showed Five Go Mad in Dorset [the Comic Strip film that starred many of the Comedy Store regulars]. That’s what changed it. I got a call almost immediately saying: “Can you get five more done? We want a series.”
Mayer: Rik, Ben and I would meet and discuss the through-lines and so forth. And then we’d write two complete scripts: Ben would write a script and Rik and I would write one. And we’d push them together into one, then Alexei would have additional material, the stuff that he was doing. It would come out as an hour long or something. Then someone – usually me – would stay up all night editing it. We were determined to make them all really unpleasant. If you look at Fawlty Towers, none of them are really likable. The audience are predisposed to like main characters so you don’t actually have to make them sympathetic. We liked the idea that people would try and like these characters but that, every time they did, it would blow up in their face.
Jackson: Vyvyan’s entry, crashing through the set on the wrecking ball, set the tone perfectly. It was the biggest entrance I can remember in a live sitcom. That was the moment when everyone there thought, Hang on, this is going to be different! And of course, in the studio, the audience just went berserk.
Planer: I got a note saying would I go and audition for the part of Neil. And I said: “No, if you don’t cast me, you’ll have to take him out of the series. Because that’s my act.”
Shooting that was just an absolute joy. We had to bury Ade up to his neck and swing a boot at him, just for that one shot on the railway line
Sayle: I was the first one to be on television in a substantial way – on OTT, which was a late-night version of the kids’ show Tiswas. But what I really needed was, rather than being in a show that was at odds with my ethos, to be in something that was part of it. As soon I read the scripts for The Young Ones, I realised this was it. Rather than just us doing our acts, it deconstructed the sitcom. It took a TV form and blew it apart in the way that we’d done to cabaret at the Comedy Store. They didn’t need me, really. But I’d been the dad at the Comedy Store. So they were too frightened of me to exclude me!
Mayer: Alexei was the person that everyone was in awe of. He was more senior and he was actually working class whereas everyone else was just pretending. Having his seal of approval helped. When Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders started doing standup, we wanted them in it, too. We were able to create employment. The only casting we did was for Mike; for everyone else, it was like, “Let’s give that part to so-and-so…”
Christopher Ryan (Mike): I was doing a play called Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! by Dario Fo. Maggie Steed was in it and Maggie’s partner at the time was Andy de la Tour, who was part of the alternative comedy scene. Peter Richardson wasn’t going to be involved so Andy suggested me. I went along and met Paul, Rik, Lise and Nigel. And I read and did a couple of improvisations and that was it.
Jackson: Chris was a really good actor but he wasn’t part of the alternative circuit and he’s suddenly surrounded by all these young people. It was difficult and he coped really well.
Ryan: 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.
Planer: Chris Ryan was very popular among us and absolutely brilliant in the show. My theory is: if you unpick that linchpin, the whole thing would collapse.
Mayer: It’s sort of a family. A dysfunctional family. We were all still so near to being students. We’d just left so we were still imbued with the memory of living like that.
There’s something about the verve of doing things when you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re making mistakes in public but you also invent things
Jackson: Ben used to write a play a week but they were all written at university. They all had ideas literally pouring out of them and threw them all down on the table.
Planer: It’s in disguise but it is a structured, normal sitcom. You have Rick and Vyvyan, the quarrelling siblings, and you have Mum and Dad. Neil is obviously mum; he does all the cooking and complains a lot.
Jackson: Vyvyan personifies the destructive, couldn’t-care-less side of it. He was the nihilist so he gave the show that cartoon violence: it’s no accident that it’s his head that got kicked along the railway line (after the character was decapitated in the University Challenge episode, Bambi). Shooting that was just an absolute joy. We had to bury Ade up to his neck and swing a boot at him, just for that one shot on the railway line. If you think of The Young Ones without the manic, destructive energy of Vyvyan, it would be a completely different show and not a quarter as good.
Rik Mayall (Rick), speaking in 1987: Rick is just self-centred… He wants street cred, wants to be a rebel, to care about nothing and be an anarchist. But we all know he’s a hypocrite and that he’ll be a computer analyst by the time he’s 30, the little sh*t.
Planer: Rik was a special person: infuriating and inspiring at the same time. There’s a video on YouTube of us doing the Who’s My Generation live [for a benefit show] – Ade, me, as Neil, Rowland Rivron on drums. But Rik as lead singer, is putting about 12 times more energy into it than is necessary or even desirable. It’s insane and really funny and epitomises what he could do that was so unique.
Jackson: Ade is a brilliant physical comic and his timing with Rik was extraordinary. You’ve got this lunatic with four studs drilled into his head, but in real life he was much quieter than Rik. I’ve always found him really reassuring and solid and professional to work with.
Sayle: If there was a star, it was Rik. I was very fond of him. He could be infuriating but he was naturally very funny. It came easily to him. He wasn’t ever going to do a sophisticated Broadway comedy, he just made you laugh. He was just full of life.
Mayer: We often had to defend the show on moral grounds. We got called in once by [BBC executive] Jim Moir, who said that we couldn’t have a scene with Vyvyan f**king the floor. It was actually a scene where he was doing press-ups at a party to try and impress girls. They thought it was obscene even when it wasn’t!
The BBC was definitely a braver organisation back then. The people who were commissioning then had been programme makers themselves. They weren’t just bureaucrats
Planer: They had to pull a shot when Rik is playing with a tampon. He finds it in a girl’s bag and pulls it out and pretends it’s a mouse. And as I recall, he popped it into her glass of red wine and it swelled up and came out red. And that was the only point when the BBC felt it had gone too far.
Mayer: More or less every other week, there was a visit to A&E. We had these crazy, inventive special effects guys who had a whole department in North Acton. We’d say “Can we have a sofa that turns into a coffin?” or whatever. “A giant eclair that falls from the ceiling?” And they’d make them.
Planer: There wasn’t much health and safety. Things were falling on our heads! I had to go to the osteopath after the episode with the giant eclair. I’m the tallest, so I took the weight of it. We actually had a live elephant in the studio. There’s a scene where Rik and Ade are fighting on the bed and the floor caves in. And on the actual set, the floor caved in. They fell 15 feet on a bed. They both jarred their spines. They carried on acting but that was certainly one of the narrow escapes.
I was sad that we didn’t do a bit more. It was popular, and that was a struggle for me
Jackson: The designer, Graeme Storey, was brilliant. We said to him: it’s part Steptoe and Son and part student house. Graham did a brilliant job of designing this grotty, grungy place. When you’ve got a situation where you need two actors to be able to literally fall through the floor, that’s a massive rig. And those things are expensive.
Planer: We quite deliberately made it look crap. By then, everyone was straining to get high-tech special effects involved in things. We wanted it to look cheap, like they’d made a mistake hiring us. You know that graffiti spray paint? Before I went on, they’d spray me from head to toe in brown to make me look dirtier. I can still smell that show now.
Jackson: You couldn’t have made The Young Ones on a sitcom budget. It was expensive. We liked having the music and we liked having the bands. But one of the reasons we had them on was so we would qualify as an entertainment show and get a bigger budget.
Mayer: Mainly me and Rik chose the bands. The Damned and Motörhead were really sweet. The naughtiest person we had on – and you probably wouldn’t even notice it was her – was Andi Oliver, when she was in Rip Rig & Panic.
Andi Oliver (Rip Rig & Panic): I was about 19. When I see it I look like a small child. I think Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders were on that episode because I just remember them being hilariously funny. Gareth Sager (Rip Rig & Panic frontman) decided that we weren’t going to have proper instruments so they were playing washing-up liquid bottles and stuff. There was a lot of alcohol involved. Years later, I saw Lise Mayer and she was like: “God, you guys were wild!”
Sayle: It was Rik, Lise and Ben’s obsession that they were only going to do 12 episodes. I was sad that we didn’t do a bit more. It was popular, and that was a struggle for me. Because my own work was abrasive and challenging in some ways, I struggled with popularity. The Young Ones delivered me a kind of popularity by proxy which I appreciated.
There’s a wonderful feeling about all watching the same thing at the same time. It’s not just the giving of pleasure to other people, it’s the collective experience
Jackson: If 12 episodes was enough for John Cleese, it’s enough for us. Everybody knew that was it. And to be very sure, they were absolutely and completely murdered. We put them in a bus and drove it off a cliff. It hit the ground and then, nothing! So we were left with the terrible dilemma of whether we approached it because it was full of explosives. There were conversations about how to detonate it. And that’s when we put the little: “Phew, that was close!” voiceover in [before the bus eventually explodes]. Because the shot we wanted, of it hitting the ground and exploding, just didn’t happen.
Sayle: When you’re in the middle of a thing like that, you don’t understand the impact. You’re the one group of people who isn’t part of that conversation. You don’t get to say: “Wow, did you see The Young Ones?” For years, I probably paid no attention to it at all, really; it’s only in the last 10 years or so that I’ve looked at the episodes. But it’s very evocative to watch them. We were happy and young.
Planer: When The Young Ones came out, there were only three channels. You could watch that or a heartwarming comedy drama or a soap. There wasn’t a lot going down. There’s a wonderful feeling about all watching the same thing at the same time. It’s not just the giving of pleasure to other people, it’s the collective experience.
Punk wouldn’t be punk if it wasn’t rough around the edges. If you tried to tidy up The Young Ones, you’d ruin it
Sayle: It’s about being fresh to something. If you don’t know the rules, you can’t conform to them. But the BBC was definitely a braver organisation back then. The people who were commissioning then had been programme makers themselves. They weren’t just bureaucrats.
Ryan: I can be anywhere and people will bring it up. Just today, I was walking down the street and someone told me they knew me. People smile when they talk about The Young Ones.
Mayer: Watching it at the time, all I could see were the bits that didn’t quite come out right. Now, even though lots of it doesn’t work, it’s got so much in it. So many ideas in it. There’s something about the verve of doing things when you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re making mistakes in public but you also invent things. Punk wouldn’t be punk if it wasn’t rough around the edges. If you tried to tidy up The Young Ones, you’d ruin it. – Guardian
The Young Ones: The Complete Collection 40th Anniversary Edition is out on Blu-ray on Monday, November 28th
