PODCAST – THE YOUNG ONES

In the summer of 2017, a Lisa P and Andrew T, the rather lovely creators of the "AROUND THE ARCHIVES" Podcast asked me if I'd perhaps like to contribute a piece to their sterling monthly efforts of talking about Archive TV. After a couple of false starts, and the usual crushing anxieties, I finally summoned up the courage to write this piece, knowing that my previous efforts to be "spontaneous" to my list of notes about "DEPARTMENT S" had ended quite disastrously. Anyway, it's now available to the wider world - https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/round-the-archives-episode-20 - and, whilst, having now heard it, I rather wish I'd got somebody else to read it, here are the actual words.

PODCAST 3 – THE YOUNG ONES

A full six months before THE BLACK ADDER arrived on BBC1 with all it’s budget-busting attempts to become a new vehicle for one of the corporation’s rising stars, a very different show appeared over on the other side – by which I mean of course BBC2 - where four rising stars from a very different comedy background were given an opportunity to create a brand new something.

For my latest “EPISODE ONE” I’m going to mull over the strange lentil-scented brew that is DEMOLITION, the very first episode of THE YOUNG ONES the BBC’s valiant effort to contain, control and attempt to understand the shiny new Alternative Comedy scene and shape it into the familiar form of the sitcom.

Ironically very much aimed at “Young Adults” in a way that it would itself satirise within this very episode, THE YOUNG ONES blew a veritable hurricane across a television landscape that was almost bereft of entertainment aimed at that particular age group.

CHANNEL FOUR was looming large, having launched just a week earlier, and looked as if it might be going to play terribly well with the youth audiences that the BBC were failing to engage with, and this series looked very much like it might tick all the right boxes.

Strangely, the choice to make them students does already distance them from much of the disaffected young and poor of the Thatcher Years, but the general air of anarchy seems to have appealed regardless.

That said, I was a student myself around that time – albeit not a particularly rebellious one – and I had a friend who maintained that there was more fun to be had in the average episode of TERRY AND JUNE than in anything this show had to offer.

Some people are born contrary, I suppose, or maybe he had a point.

The summer after this series was on, I was unlucky enough to attend one of those parties held in the house of someone with terribly well-off parents, and, at about two o’clock in the morning, someone declared amidst the carnage that they had a tape with all six episodes of THE YOUNG ONES on it, and hijacked a room in which to watch it, as the sleeping drunks lay all about him.

I think I managed four, and it felt as if my mind had been bludgeoned with a misery bomb as I sloped off towards mattresses new. It was so --- RELENTLESS in its faux anarchy that you really felt as if your entire consciousness had been beaten up and spat out whilst you were pogo-ing in a mosh pit, if that mosh pit had been a comfy sofa in a dark suburban living room, and I’d even known back then quite what a mosh pit was.

Three performers well known amongst the Alternative Comedy Club scene, ADRIAN – sorry ADE - EDMONDSON, NIGEL PLANER and the already familiar RIK MAYALL – mainly to television comedy viewers from his KEVIN TURVEY stints on A KICK UP THE EIGHTIES – were teamed up with An Actor - CHRISTOPHER RYAN – to create four deadbeat yet distinct character types unfortunate enough to be sharing some frankly terrible student housing as they worked on their degrees at SCUMBAG COLLEGE whilst trying to avoid paying their rent to their landlords, the various members of the BULOWSKI family as played by comedy club compere ALEXEI SAYLE.

So far, so very middle class suburban.

Nevertheless, watching it again now, it all seems rather as if it’s trying just a little bit too hard, and, whilst the performers are eager to show off their Alternative Comedy credentials, they also seem not to want to upset the apple cart, bite the hand that feeds, or basically annoy the BBC too much, as if knowing full well that their own personal future successes and ambitions are very much dependent upon that Establishment Behemoth.

There is very much a sense that this is as close as the BBC ever gets to broadcasting full-on anarchy in the UK – even though there’s a cosy tendency to cut away just where the expected expletive should be – whilst trying to make some sense of what this “New Alternative Comedy thing that the young people find quite appealing” might actually be, and whether they ought to be doing some of it. See also “NOZIN’ AROUN’” That’s right, NOZIN with a Z because that’s the kind of show we are…

BEN ELTON plays one of the presenters in that segment, and he’s also the co-writer along with RIK MAYALL and LISE MEYER. ALEXEI SAYLE provides “Additional Material” and that’s the core of what would become the writing team behind a heck of a lots of 1980s comedy.

That said, as directed by PAUL JACKSON, it’s an odd beast, as a collection of forces of nature try their very best to weld themselves into a coherent whole. As a slice of the world as we lived in it in 1982, it does all rather feel rather too familiar. Much of it fails - some of it spectacularly - and yet, somehow, it all sort of works.

Sort of.

Much like life, really, if you think about it.

The episode itself opens with RIK MAYALL’s – for I think it’s him – semi-terrible performance of CLIFF RICHARD’S “THE YOUNG ONES” single being played over some frankly quite terrible wacky graphics that show – perhaps in an homage to THE MONKEES – on a quartered screen some low-grade video-disked photographs taken on some dreadful campus somewhere introducing our four heroes and their various character traits.

ADE EDMONDSON’s anarchic pseudo punk VYVYAN with a penchant for – of all things – HAWKWIND electrocutes himself comedically, over a series of stills, RIK MAYALL’s RIK is all peace signs and anti nuclear symbols, NIGEL PLANER’s NEIL is very much the bored yawning hippy, and CHRIS RYAN’s MIKE is seen already having bribed his way to a degree so, perhaps we must assume, he’s (Lord help us) a post-graduate…?

Maybe that’s overthinking it.

Or one of those people who seemed to hang around on campus for several decades beyond their initial three years for whatever reason. We all knew one of those people.

That said, the line “Shouldn’t be afraaaaaaid…” from the song backing the credits is the definitive version and is now the only way it should ever EVER be performed, especially be people of a certain age.

The final line of the song that we hear “But we may not be the Young ones (But we may not be the Young ones)” gets stuck in a loop and doesn’t fade as we cut to RIK dancing to himself on the radio in a frankly hideous kitchen also populated by NEIL, and as RIK switches himself off and announces just how “BRILLIANT!” that was - a full quarter century before Facebook bludgeoned the meaning to death and beyond - his character is immediately sketched in as he and NEIL spend a full five minutes discussing Cliff Richard, lentils, and poetry.

To be fair they don’t so much “discuss” Cliff as NEIL basically asks “What about Cliff Richard?” and RIK  - as he will – takes MASSIVE offence at this perceived slight, which is, of course, to anyone who’s ever talked to another human being ever, a perfectly judged and characteristic response.

We then get the NIGEL PLANER “hot pan of lentils” scene, which is very strangely performed. Throughout this scene it appears as if NEIL is acting on a stage and very much playing to the audience as if this is one of his familiar comedy club routines. Perhaps it was. Anyway, lentils – or dinner as the characters like to think of it – ends up on the floor just in time for RIK to walk through and read his poetry from.

A full five minutes in, MIKE arrives, played by a real actor, and gives a peculiar performance as if he’s not entirely sure either what he’s doing here, or what’s going to happen next. Also intercut with this sequence are the first of the YOUNG ONES rather legendary appalling puppets, a pair of rats who, in their first sequence, discuss the various cuisine on offer in the various houses around the neighbourhood, and in the second, after one has been bludgeoned by a guitar “Built out of matchsticks” by a relative of NEILs and retrieved from a terrifyingly horrific refrigerator, one eats the other because it’s what he would have wanted.

Back at the kitchen table, there is a dispute over the “bread” that has been spent NEIL then taps the lentil pan and calls the first of several “HOUSE MEETINGS” to explain that the extortionate “four pounds fifty each” was because he’s made thirteen lots of food because he’s going to kill himself, which he then departs to do, much to the ambivalence of the others.

Ah yes, the suicide jokes of the early eighties. Always fun.

Then, a full ten minutes into the episode, VYVYAN bursts through the wall bearing the exposition – “The council’s going to knock the house down!” and proceeds to spend the rest of the episode demolishing it from the inside so that they can’t.

Throughout the rest of the episode you will see possibly the wobbliest walls you would ever see on British TV since that one on FAWLTY TOWERS and you might notice, with not a Police Box or a Dalek in sight.

VYVYAN also brandishes the leg he’s got from the morgue that he’s supposed to write an essay on – take a drink if there’s a reference to University studies – but thinks he might attach it to the front of his car.

It’s a nice subtle touch as the bright yellow Ford Anglia with go faster Flames painted on it that we see him driving in the location work later does indeed bear that very leg as its own version of the silver lady.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

First of all we have to see the after effects of NEIL’s typically well-planned suicide attempt where everything works except the length of the rope. Happily for NEIL, this was not witnessed by anyone – or so he thinks.

We cut away to the first outsiders seen in the show. A couple of dreadful hags the best theatrical tradition sitting on a passing bus saw the whole thing and end up remarking unsympathetically on the “Stupid Hippy” and saying that he needs a good hard –

Cut to studio.

For the rest of the studio-based part of the episode, NEIL will be confined to sitting on the toilet and the running gag of him getting soaked in several ways, from a soil pipe broken by VYVYAN on his demolition quest, to the cistern collapsing.

Meanwhile downstairs, in the best tradition of those early Venus Smith AVENGERS episodes we have a musical interlude with “NINE BELOW ZERO” – a kind of proto THE JAM combo – blast out one of their hot tunes.

Rather a catchy little number I thought. It stuck in my head for a while, but I’ve forgotten it now.

Actually the sudden unexplained appearance of some Rocknerroll Combo or other is another of the things that stick in the memory from watching THE YOUNG ONES back then. I seem to remember it had something to do with getting an “Entertainment” or “Variety” budget or somesuch. The bands seldom interacted much with the cast (apart from SUGGS from MADNESS I seem to remember) and they were all very much from the “Alternative Music” scene which did rather appeal to those of us so despairing at the blandness of most telly pap music back then.

VYVYAN and RIK headbang furiously along with the music, whilst MIKE remains unmoved, sitting in position waiting to continue the cutaway edit later.

And so, having reached around the half way mark, the anarchy continues. This is television seriously playing around with itself, as it were, with ever longer interludes unrelated to the main plot sitting alongside VYVYAN’s various attempts to bring down the house.

The Godfather of Alternative Comedy ALEXEI SAYLE suddenly arrives as a heavily accented member of the BOLOWSKI family – possibly JERTZEI judging by the fifties HANCOCKIAN hat and overcoat – pretending that he’s a full British citizen by making outrageous references to BOBBY CHARLTON and so on.

Breaking the fourth wall, he launches into one of his classic angry monologues in his more familiar Liverpool drawl starting with “I’m not really foreign you know…” and then, with a quick “Back to the actin’” he’s back in character and being financially outwitted by our heroes before departing to return in the next episode.

MIKE gets the chance to play a rather lame “I never knew there was so much in it” gag with an edition of the TV Times – younger viewers may not recognize that well-known advertising slogan – and, despite the mountain of garbage that does fall out of it, it’s possibly now most interesting for having DENNIS WATERMAN and GEORGE COLE on the cover promoting a new series of MINDER.

RIK settles down in front of the telly to watch some brand new telly programme aimed – at last - at young adults – or so it is claimed. This is, of course, the NOZIN’ AROUND sequence mentioned earlier, and, whilst it does have a lot to say about television’s notions of wot yoof programming out to be about – not being able to drink in pubs at sixteen, mostly – and unhip University professors with names like Roland Pervical – nicely underplayed by ANTHONY SHARP - trying to look trendy and spout meaningless drivel about yoof unemployment “Although I must stress you have to have a degree” – all to a techno beat with ghastly presenters, it does seem to hang around just a little too long – although, as an old OXFORD ROAD SHOW viewer, I did enjoy CHRISTINE ELLERBECK on the gantry – sorry scaffolding – for no good reason at all – and all this does serve to remind me that BEN ELTON did spend rather too many years fronting that particular kind of programme later.

That “smug git” persona he was portraying never seemed far enough removed from actual smug gittishness, if you know what I mean…

Mercifully, RIK smashes in the unconvincing blue screen TV in frustration, and the ensuing demolition brings us crashing through the wall where Cyril Shaps and Hilary Mason take us through a strangely touching Brechtian – or maybe its Chekhovian – interlude lamenting the passing years over the heat of a fading lightbulb.

This is all underplayed beautifully as RIK decides to complain about the noise as VYVYAN proceeds to carry on with ever more demolition to increasingly fragile looking scenery.

With some relief we leave the studio and spend the last several minutes of the show burning up the location filming budget on a chilly-looking snowy morning somewhere in the suburbs of London.

RIK is hanging from a shockingly daring crucifix in protest at the impending demolition of his home which I imagine was intended to be shockingly daring but I imagine would get far more reaction in these easily offended times than it did at the time. I suspect that the target demographic probably just thought it was funny, and those that might have been offended – apart from one or two more devout students – probably turned it off during the first five minutes anyway.

MIKE meanwhile had donned a pair of ghastly ski-ing sunglasses and, having found out that the council representative is a woman – a woman played by MAGGIE STEED no less (!) – sets about trying out – and apparently succeeding with – his best seduction techniques.

NEIL gets to do more pratting about with massive lentil-filled saucepans, and VYVYAN takes on the demolition team in his souped up Ford Anglia with aforementioned human leg attachment.

An aeroplane is spotted and, with our heroes firmly signposting what’s about to happen, as a tribute to QUATERMASS AND THE PIT – probably - we cut to the interior of a very unconvincing cockpit inside which ANDY DE LA TOUR and that PAUL BRADLEY bloke who used to play NIGEL on EASTENDERS when I used to watch it basically crash the plane into our heroes, their house, and, I imagine most of the street, as we cut to some frankly bonkers yet utterly memorable end credits music.

Ah… perhaps I ought to have issued a SPOILER ALERT because they all die at the end.

Although of course, they don’t.

Next week they would be back in a more structurally sound and far more iconic set to discover oil and listen to RADICAL POSTURE sing DOCTOR MARTEN’S BOOTS at them.

But that’s for another day.

It’s hard to explain what an impact THE YOUNG ONES actually made upon the TV comedy scene in the eighties. Much like the alumni from NOT THE NINE O’CLOCK NEWS and the FRY AND LAURIE Footlights gang, most – but not all - of the COMIC STRIP performers would be pretty much everywhere within a very short space of time and shaping what we saw on all four channels for much of the next decade or so, and leaving this show behind them as they went. 

Like the BBC’s FAWLTY TOWERS there would only ever be twelve episodes made and unlike Tom and Jerry – upon which a lot of RIK and ADE’s comedy seems to be based - these characters would not survive their final Bus Ride to Oblivion – at least not until CLIFF answered their call.

Their influence is phenomenal, though. It gets everywhere. Whilst I was working on this piece, I suddenly remembered my own small contribution to their legacy, a comic strip drawn very poorly about three years later for a DOCTOR WHO fan magazine. I suddenly remembered drawing it and wasn’t even sure that I’d actually ever sent it off, but after a brief rummage through the attic of my own crumbling pile of a home, I found it. Written and drawn in those pre-google days from memory, and adapting some of the best gags, you know what, I even thought that some of the gags were still quite funny, which means that, despite everything, the original probably was, too.

THE YOUNG ONES would go on for another eleven episodes over two short series, and it would get far better, tighter and far funnier, leaving some genuine all-time comedy moments behind it, as well as a classic number one charity single, and it spark a lasting legacy of other notable sitcoms before the YOUNG ONES started getting far LESS young and began doing stupid things like dying far TOO young.

Because sadly, even for the people’s poet, it seems we all may not be THE YOUNG ONES very long.