Abigoliah: Hello there! This is the new podcast All British Comedy Explained and I am Abigoliah and with me is Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there.
Abigoliah: Hello. How are you feeling today?
Tom: I’m good, I’m good. I’m looking forward to today. We have something which is a bit of a contrast to what we had last time, although I think some of the people making it felt similarly, as if they were doing something really fresh and exciting and that it was about time.
Abigoliah: Do you not think it was fresh and exciting?
Tom: Oh, I absolutely do. In fact, in many ways I think it’s more fresh and exciting. But just before we move on to The Young Ones, which is our episode for today, I realized after our last recording, I’d gone to all the trouble of finding a version of the parrot sketch and showing it to you and then didn’t ask you about it on mic. And this is such a famous sketch, it gets endlessly quoted. John Cleese quoted it at Graham Chapman’s funeral.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: Margaret Thatcher quoted it at Tory party conference after the Liberal Democrats unveiled their new logo, which looked like a bird, and she started saying this is an ex-party, it is expired and ceased to be. It’s gone to meet its maker.
Abigoliah: Listen, I don’t think I would classify myself as a fan of Thatcher, but that’s. That’s a funny own.
Tom: It went down very well. Yeah. Because, you know, those kind of conferences, anything even resembling a joke gets such a rolls and rolls of goodwill, people just lap it up. So you don’t have to try particularly hard. Wait till we get to. Yes, Minister. But now I’m really getting ahead of myself. Did you find the parrot sketch at all amusing?
Abigoliah: I did, I did, I really liked it. I will say, once I went back and rewatched our episode, I think my favourite sketch, though, was the one where they had the annoying guy breaking plates, who I was like, I’m afraid this is how people see me. And you told me that that’s one that’s like not famous at all. No, I think what I learned, if you compare the parrot sketch to the what I’m going to call the breaking plate sketch I think what I’ve learned is I like the really loud slapsticky kind of.
Tom: Well, in that case, I think you’re going to really like the young ones.
Abigoliah: Now, you have instructed me to do no research before we do an episode. However, I did do one thing before the young ones. Okay. I thought I was like, I just want to see a little bit of Rik Mayall before we get going. Obviously, I didn’t want to watch any British comedy, so I watched the film Drop Dead Fred.
Tom: Okay. All right. I have not seen Drop Dead Fred, though I have seen clips. I do know it exists. And it was his attempt to kind of break into Hollywood.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Didn’t work.
Tom: Drop Dead Fred did not make any money, so it didn’t work.
Abigoliah: It was famously panned.
Tom: He was also cast as peeves, the ghost in the first Harry Potter film.
Abigoliah: And then he got cut.
Tom: But they couldn’t make the effects work, so it all got cut.
Abigoliah: That’s a shame. So drop dead, Fred, I I liked it more than I thought I would. I think that Rik Mayall did a great job in it.
Tom: He’s such a force of nature. He’s such a bundle of comic energy.
Abigoliah: For the fact that it was a children’s movie, and he is playing an imaginary character. What I didn’t expect. Watching it is looking at it and going, I think Rik Mayall’s cute. I want Rik Mayall to be my boyfriend.
Tom: A lot of people fancied Rik Mayall and again, we might watch. I don’t know how long this podcast is going to survive, but if we keep going, then another Rik Mayall show that’s on the list is The New Statesman. Okay, where he plays an Oleaginous Tory MP. And that was much less of a grotesque than some of his other characters. Okay, so some people who hadn’t really fancied Rick mail as Rick in The Young Ones really fancied him as Alan B’stard in The New Statesman.
Abigoliah: Oh, listen to that, Alan B’stard. Alan, I’m already. I’m already crushing. I’m already. I’m I’m ready. I’m ready for it, by the way.
Tom: For people watching on YouTube, let’s put a picture of Rik Mayall as Alan B’stard.
Abigoliah: Okay. And you’ve seen the picture now, I will say, as Tom pointed out, if this podcast survives this, this is very new. So if you’re listening for the first time, I’m just gonna say, like, subscribe. There’s a YouTube channel. Please tell your friends. Okay, there we go. Plug over.
Tom: All right. So is that the extent of your pre-knowledge about the young ones?
Abigoliah: Yes. And then I watched the university challenge you sent me.
Tom: Yes. I wanted to just watch five minutes of the old 80s version of University Challenge, just for a little bit of context. And the reason why will become clear at some point in the next two hours.
Abigoliah: Okay. One question about University Challenge. Each team had like a little plushie of an animal in front of their little mascot.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Little mascot. Is that going to be relevant on whatever we watch?
Tom: Kind of. Okay, but that’s not the reason I wanted you to watch it. Okay. It was more general because anyway, you’ll see.
Abigoliah: You’ll see in my head I was like, I wonder if that’s going to be a visual gag whenever we watch whatever we’re watching. But yes, tell me about the young ones so we know Rik Mayall is in it.
Tom: Yep. So this.
Abigoliah: My boyfriend?
Tom: Your boyfriend? Well, we’re going to 1982. So this is the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who was taking Britain to war against the Argentines to liberate the Falkland Islands. This year Johnny Cash hosts Saturday Night Live and E.T. Breaks box office records.
Abigoliah: And that’s why Drop Dead Fred didn’t do it. Drop Dead Fred came out in 91, I think. But go on.
Tom: All right, so last time we watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus. That is an example of students from Oxford and Cambridge, especially Cambridge, going to university, getting a degree, doing sketch shows while they’re there, and then trusting that a nice man from the BBC will give them a job in comedy, if that’s what they want.
Abigoliah: And that is exactly what happened.
Tom: It is again and again and again. And not that those people aren’t deserving, but that was this almost like conveyor belt.
Abigoliah: Not to out you, but are you a Footlights guy?
Tom: No no no no, I wish, I wish.
Abigoliah: Were you Oxford? You went to one of them, didn’t you?
Tom: No I didn’t. Deborah went to Oxford.
Abigoliah: Deborah.
Tom: I tagged along after I’d already got my degree from Southampton. But I was, of course, a member of the Southampton comedy group, and we did take sketch shows to Edinburgh.
Abigoliah: But they weren’t called the Footlights. They were called the… Toe Candles?
Tom: Well, to the embarrassment of the guy who was producing the shows because he couldn’t get away from it. Some hilarious students of years gone past had called the Southampton Comedy Society The Pig Fondler’s Comedy Guild.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And Aled very wisely, would not let us go to Edinburgh under that title, but go to Edinburgh. We did, and we did a sketch show when I was 19 years old, which was described perfectly accurately in The Scotsman newspaper as “a shambling collection of crippled sketches”.
Abigoliah: That’s beautiful.
Tom: So well done to me.
Abigoliah: But you know what you gotta review.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: You gotta review.
Tom: It was 1991. It was easier to get reviews.
Abigoliah: Anyone could be on the BBC. Anyone could get a review. In Edinburgh. It was a different time in comedy.
Tom: So if you turn on the TV in the early 80s and look for comedy, you kind of saw one of three things. You saw Monty Python repeats or Monty Python knockoffs. The other route to comedy was the northern working man’s clubs. Okay, so that gave rise to lots of men in frilly shirts leaning on microphone stands telling mother in law jokes.
Abigoliah: So this would be like the equivalent to the Catskills comedians in America.
Tom: But they are much less fondly looked back on. I think the Catskill comedians, although they’re seen as a bit low rent, kind of gave rise to people like Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Henny Youngman. Not so much.
Abigoliah: I think they’re also further back in time. They’re like 50s. 60s?
Tom: Yeah, but not so much the Bernard Mannings of this world. You know that name?
Abigoliah: Let’s just say no. I’m gonna stop pretending.
Tom: Google Bernard Manning in your own time. But when you’re alone, ideally. And then, of course, there were sitcoms, but they were all kind of mired in triviality. They were all like domestic sofas in front of French windows. So there’s a bit of a gap in the market. And it was filled not from Oxford or Cambridge, but from Manchester.
Abigoliah: Which is where.
Tom: Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson and Ben Elton all met while they were students. So Ben Elton was more of a writer, but Mayall and Edmondson formed a double act and began performing at the Comedy Store, which had newly opened in London, basically in a strip club.
Abigoliah: Yes, yes, I know these stories. As I perform the story, it’s no longer a strip club. No.
Tom: Well, it’s also changed locations several times. Yeah. And then there was a rival club called the Comic Strip, which was in the Raymond Revuebar.
Abigoliah: Not around anymore. Who won?
Tom: Danny Ward. Absolutely. And so this group of so-called alternative comedians began to coalesce. So it’s people like Peter Richardson, Nigel Planer, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, and especially the absolutely fearless emcee Alexei Sayle, who they all looked up to. So French and Saunders, I think you do know a little bit. Have you heard of Alexei Sayle? No. Okay.
Abigoliah: Girl or boy?
Tom: Oh, boy. Are you going to meet him? They’re almost all boys. Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders are somewhat of the the exception. And these shows, they’re in a kind of stand up club environment, but they often feel more like sketch. So Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, for example, would do these incredibly laborious routine where they were trying to tell a very bad joke and just couldn’t get it out and kept interrupting each other and so on. So they are playing very extreme characters. It has this anarchic, energetic style. It often has quite a satirical left wing attitude, and it’s completely different from anything that is on TV. Utterly different. So much so that basically nobody in television knew what to do with them. In 1981, there was a documentary made by Julien Temple, but other than that, cameras pretty much stayed away, except for a very young producer called Paul Jackson, who’d been working on what are sometimes called shiny floor shows.
Abigoliah: Okay. So those are, are are those like game shows and stuff?
Tom: Yeah. Light entertainment shows or more mainstream things like the Two Ronnies.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And he managed to get a stand up special made with some of these people called Boom Boom Out Go the Lights. And it was shown to no acclaim whatsoever. Okay. And has now been utterly forgotten, except that it’s on the Blu-ray of The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: I was going to say. Is there footage of it?
Tom: Absolutely. It all exists. Yeah. So he thought, okay, we need to try and get these anarchic personalities into some kind of more recognisable shape. And he asked Rik Mayall and Rik Mayall’s partner Lise Mayer, to work on a sitcom, and they brought in their friend Ben Elton and got to work.
Abigoliah: Is this, this is you said this all happened in 83.
Tom: 81.
Abigoliah: 81. So this is before like Britpop and Oasis and all that? Yeah. So this is before Manchester had that moment. This is a different Manchester moment.
Tom: Okay. Yeah. So what the writers thought was we have these two great double acts that are tearing up the stage at the comic strip. Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson on one side and Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson on the other. But before they could start recording.
Abigoliah: Wait, back up, wasn’t Ben Elton somehow involved in this?
Tom: Elton’s one of the writers. Okay, so he doesn’t appear on camera.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: That’s not true. He appears in some cameos, but he’s not part of the regular cast. But you won’t see Peter Richardson either, because Peter Richardson fell out with Paul Jackson and he’s replaced by Christopher Ryan, who’s just an actor. He’s never been part of The Comic Strip up till this point. Okay, so he feels a little bit like the odd one out.
Abigoliah: Okay. Much like Tom Waits in..
Tom: Oh my God.
Abigoliah: We forgot to mention this at the beginning of the podcast.
Tom: Just to pause for a moment. I am 95% sure that the man you think is Tom Waits is one of the Fred Tomlinson Singers who were regular supporters brought in to Monty Python episodes when music was needed. Because the man you think is Tom waits is seen as part of the little like string quintet or whatever it is. Yes, he is. And the Fred Tomlinson Singers are credited on that episode. So therefore he is one of the Fred Tomlinson Singers. So unless you know that Tom waits was also one of the Fred Tomlinson Singers…
Abigoliah: I may have not been able to find any accurate reporting. Saying that was Tom Waits. However, I think what’s interesting is that Tom Waits was part of the Fred Tomlinson Quartet.
Tom: Moving on. So one of the reasons that Peter Richardson is not involved in The Young Ones is that he is talking instead to Jeremy Isaacs, and Jeremy Isaacs is launching Channel Four, which is the aptly named fourth television network that is launching in Britain in 1982.
Abigoliah: So in 1982, before 1982, only three channels.
Tom: BBC One, BBC Two and ITV.
Abigoliah: Wow. And now a fourth.
Tom: Yes. And it was designed to kind of be a bit more quirky, to cater to things that wouldn’t get on the more mainstream BBC and ITV channels. And it was a bit of a hybrid. It got some public money, but it also carried advertising.
Tom: So Jeremy Isaacs tells the press that he is including in his opening night lineup, a new short film from the exciting comic strip team. And the BBC are furious because how is it that this new upstart channel has got access to this exciting new talent? And Paul Jackson has to tell them, guys, we made a pilot with these people like six months ago, and you told me to forget all about it.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: Literally, one of the high ups is supposed to have said to Paul Jackson afterwards, who was a very young producer very early in his career, said to him, oh, don’t worry, Paul, we’ve all got far worse failures than that in our cupboards. And now they’re telling him, can you get five more of these made as soon as possible?
Abigoliah: I love that. As soon as these guys go with a different channel, the BBC is like, I want to take you to the prom.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: I like you. Oh, this is very devious of the beebs.
Tom: So the upshot is that the film from The Comic Strip, which was called Five Go Mad in Dorset, it was a parody of Enid Blyton, went out the same week as the first episode of The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: So Rik Mayall and co were on 50% of British television at the same time.
Tom: Yeah, not the same day, but the same week.
Abigoliah: I mean, I want to, I want to make television in the 80s. That’s what I want. When you could just you could just be on television all the time.
Tom: Even if you hadn’t been to Oxford or Cambridge.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But arguably the young ones had a greater impact because there were six episodes of The Young Ones, and there was only one Comic Strip film at that point. There were many more in later years, but at that point there was only one.
Abigoliah: I will say, what I think is cool is that Channel Four’s. So was that the first thing they ever aired?
Tom: Not quite the first thing, but it was on their first night.
Abigoliah: On their first night. It was a short film because now Channel Four is really known for elevating and helping fund independent short films. My partner has done some with.
Tom: And feature films.
Abigoliah: And feature films with film for. I feel like they might not be doing as much as they used to because of funding and whatnot, but I like that. That was at the very start of their creation, and then the Beeb’s win in all selfish, just grabbing every comedian in the UK in the 80s, all seven of them, and being like, they’re ours, we want them. Yeah.
Tom: So in terms of getting this from page to screen, what Paul Jackson told the writers was, you just write anything you like. It’s up to me and my co-director, Geoff Posner, to figure out how to take what you have written and put it on screen, and then we’re going to record this in front of a live studio audience. And these were ambitious scripts, but they managed to get a bit of extra money and an extra day in the studio by selling it to the BBC as a variety show instead of a sitcom. So what that meant was they had a whole extra day where they could do pre-filming on the set before the audience came in, and when you watch the episode, you’ll understand why that was so necessary. But the price they paid was that every episode had to include a music performance from a band.
Abigoliah: So they’ve written these perfect comedy scripts, all six of them. And now they have to just wedge a musical number in there for no reason at all.
Tom: And in many sitcoms, this would be an issue. If your sitcom is set in a bank or a domestic home, that’s a problem. But The Young Ones is kind of insane. And so you can just have the characters discover AmaZulu playing Moonlight Romance in the living room.
Abigoliah: That’s so specific. It’s a real thing.
Tom: It’s a.
Abigoliah: Real thing. Okay, great.
Tom: One of the episodes we were watching. But yes, but this show is a sensation, especially when it’s repeated, and especially when it gets discovered by teenagers and even younger kids. It wasn’t aimed at them. It went out at 9:00 at night. But this is also the very, very earliest days of home video recorders.
Abigoliah: This is giving me MTV vibes.
Tom: Yeah. Kind of. It’s kind of like kind of punk energy.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: And it’s like it’s for the kids.
Abigoliah: So if it was so successful why did they only get two seasons?
Tom: Well, they thought if 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers was good enough for John Cleese, then 12 episodes of The Young Ones was good enough for them.
Abigoliah: This is what happens when you don’t have advertising driving your channel. You just stop making good stuff.
Tom: Surprisingly, the BBC wanted more. They would happily have had more, but Rik Mayall and co were convinced 12 was enough and in fact.
Abigoliah: Oh, so it was them. It wasn’t the beebs. Okay, see, I thought it was the beebs who were like, you only get 12 because John only did 12.
Tom: They wanted to stop at 12, and they killed all the main characters off at the end of the 12th episode.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: But there were a few more things after that. There were tie in books, several of them. Around the same time. There was a video game.
Tom: And there was even a hit single in 1986 as part of the first Comic Relief event. So.
Abigoliah: Was it a techno version of The Young Ones?
Tom: Well, so The Young Ones is a Cliff Richard song, you know, Cliff Richard. Yeah. Okay. Just checking. And the Rik character in The Young Ones has a weird obsession with Cliff Richard.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And so the opening theme is the cast singing The Young Ones. And then they got Cliff himself to join them for a rendition of Living Doll, which they put out in 86, and it sold a million and a half copies and spent three weeks at number one.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: So there’s quite a big footprint that this show has. So we are going to be watching the second episode of the first series. So they did the pilot, and then they changed a bunch of stuff in between because several months had gone by. I think the first episode was filmed in Manchester and subsequent episodes were filmed in Bristol, or maybe the other way around. I should probably double check that. But they filmed in a new house. They’ve actually blown the house up at the end of the first episode, so the second episode of the first series feels like a little bit of a reboot. It’s also got some of my favourite moments in it. And then the first episode of the second series, Bambi, which is just the best episode of The Young Ones and it’s just terrific all the way through. The second series is more confident than the first series. They came back really like, okay, we know how to do this. They didn’t learn too many lessons in restraint from how difficult it was to get the first series shot. They just carried on doing whatever they wanted, but the characters are clearer and the ambition is still there.
Abigoliah: But they knew they only had six left, so they just left it all on the field.
Tom: Yeah, yeah. Drive it like you stole it.
Abigoliah: Oh, I love it. I can’t wait to watch this.
Tom: I think you’re gonna really enjoy this.
Abigoliah: I have a feeling because my boyfriend’s in it. Rik Mayall, my boyfriend, Drop Dead fred. All right. So. Okay, here’s what I’m picturing that’s going to happen. One, you mentioned that they’re a quote unquote variety show. So I, I think I think also contractually they have to have music for some reason. There’s going to be spinning plates. I just see spinning plates and juggling. You mentioned they’re overambitious scripts. So for no reason whatsoever they’ll go to the moon. I also think it’s going to be kind of like an odd couple thing where one is a complete mess and a really sloppy One is really fastidious and clean. There is a woman and a weird neighbor across the hall. Seinfeld I think we’re going to watch Seinfeld. But Manchester, Manchester in their 20s.
Tom: That is that is some of that is accurate. Some of that is way off.
* * * * *
Tom: All right. That seemed like it was a bit more to your taste.
Abigoliah: I really liked that. I liked that very much so. We do have four archetypes. Although I was wrong. They’re all messy, but. So we have Rick, who’s an anarchist. They’re all supposed to be in uni. Vivian, who’s a metal head, who is the hippie? And Mike, who at first I thought was a Tory but turns out to be a gangster.
Tom: Yeah, I used like, an arch capitalist.
Abigoliah: Okay. Arch capitalist. So, Tory. I was right the first time, and for some reason is in his 40s, where the rest of them seem age appropriate. He’s like the Fonz. It’s like, why are you hanging out with these children?
Tom: So there’s one theory of sitcoms that states that all sitcoms are built around four archetypes, and they are matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown. And you can kind of map those onto lots of different sitcoms. So obviously here Mike is the patriarch. Yeah, Neil is the matriarch, Vyvyan is the craftsman, and Rik is the clown.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: But you can do that with you can do that with Seinfeld, which we talked about earlier. You can do it with quite a lot of others. So like all these things, it’s post-hoc analysis. It’s something you can see only as you look back. No one is thinking my sitcom needs a craftsman and a clown. But it’s interesting that the same kind of patterns keep emerging in different ways, and that you can see that line that connects something as slick and glossy as Seinfeld, as something as grubby and nonsensical as the young ones.
Abigoliah: And one thing that I felt like I saw, maybe them learn from Monty Python is like the segue into a sketch without a button on the last thing, which when we went into the cellar and there were these men who were on vacation or hallucinating, I was I was like, wait, are they prisoners? What’s happening here? Were they are they like, famous cameos? Should know. Okay, so those are just actors.
Tom: They’re just jobbing actors. So a lot of the other people like Tony Robinson, Robbie Coltrane, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones were other up and comers around this time would have been familiar from other comedy shows. They’re just two actors.
Abigoliah: I liked that the in the second episode that we watched, that the Footlights played the footlights like that. That was a fun cameo because I was like, I know who they are, I know them.
Tom: And you see now why I want you to watch a little bit of the original University challenge. And one of the jokes there is that it’s always shot in a studio, with one team on Bamber Gascoigne’s left side and one team on Bamber Gascoigne’s right side, and then in the edit.
Abigoliah: They put them on top.
Tom: So they actually created a set with one up top and one below so that Rick could kick Ben Elton in the head.
Abigoliah: Hilarious hilarity could ensue. I thought that it really reminded me of with the comedic violence. It really reminded me of, like, Looney Tunes or The Three Stooges. Like the way they beat up on each other.
Tom: And again, all being done in front of the studio audience with a guy whose job it was to push a button to make a smack sound effect to time perfectly with the the cricket bat hitting someone’s head.
Abigoliah: So that’s not in post.
Tom: That’s not in post, that’s being done live in front of the audience.
Abigoliah: Oh wow.
Tom: They said they got to the point where especially Rik and Ade would just, in rehearsal, just suddenly turn around and belt the other one to try and catch this man out, and they never could.
Abigoliah: Oh that’s amazing. I wondered, as we were watching it, like how hard it had to be to keep a straight face. At one point, I think the first time they mentioned Rik’s leaky bottom, which now I’m thinking that Rik Mayall had like IBS and that was a running joke. But the first time, haha. The first time they did it, I almost saw him smile, I feel like. But I was like, how did they have to do a lot of takes? Or were they that good at?
Tom: I think they tried to get it in front of the audience right first time if they possibly could.
Abigoliah: Because they come from live performance, right? Like I think it would have been so hard not to break on some of that stuff. And then when the elephant showed up, I was like, I did not. You were right. This is really ambitious to do in front of a studio audience.
Tom: And kind of everyone’s doing it for the first time. Like Rick had had a character called Kevin Turvey, who was an investigative reporter who’d done a couple of shows for ITV. Weirdly, he crops up in a very early Victoria Wood would show. But I think reciting Victoria Wood’s dialogue and just for this little one off cameo. But they had so little television experience. It’s Paul Jackson’s first job as producer, and everyone is kind of just being given this incredible toy box to play with. And you can feel the enthusiasm and the glee and the joy of being able to do all this stuff.
Abigoliah: And how far can we stretch it? How far can we take it? By the way, I love the Doc Martin song. I thought we were gonna see Alexei Sayle do more singing in the second episode because I was like, This Doc Martin song is a bop. First of all, what they say £19 for Doc Martins. That’s why they used to be the shoes of a revolution. And now. Now they’re like hundreds of pounds. The second episode. So first of all, there was, I think maybe when Robbie Coltrane was on where he’s someone said, sorry, Dr Not The Nine O’Clock News. Was that guy on The Nine O’Clock News they said it to?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: Okay, but The Nine O’Clock News…
Tom: Not The Nine O’Clock News had started a few years earlier.
Abigoliah: Okay. So it okay.
Tom: Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, who cameoed in Bambi, are two of the four members of Not the Nine O’Clock News. Just a little nod to a rival comedy show. And in fact, there’s a brief reference to John Lloyd as well. John Lloyd was the producer of Not the Nine O’Clock News, and he was the one who invented the patent crop rotator.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay. Okay, I like it, I like it, I love the use of puppets. It felt very Sesame Street esque in a way. Are there puppets in every single episode? There’s puppets in every single episode. Okay.
Tom: And that was really, I think Lisa meyers big influence. She was the one who really wanted all that kind of surrealism. It was her idea to have that brief moment in Bambi where they’re all playing the wrong parts, just because she thought that would be funny. And when?
Abigoliah: Remind me who she is.
Tom: She’s Rick. Males partner.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But when they. When they broke up. So this is one of the problems. Like I said, we are kind of mired in men. So Rik, Ade, Alexei and Nigel Planer all became huge stars. So did Ben Elton, Christopher Ryan’s kind of a different category. He had a perfectly nice career as an actor, but this wasn’t a vehicle for him in the same way. But Lise Mayer, one third of the writing team when she split up with Rik Mayall basically didn’t work again. I mean, she has like, credits here and there on she does like, punch up jobs on movies and so on. But everyone else became a star and the girl one just faded away into obscurity because that’s the 80s, man.
Abigoliah: That’s really upsetting.
Tom: I know, I’m sorry.
Abigoliah: Especially if she brought so much to the table to make it so unique.
Tom: Bottom was the show then that Rik and Ade wrote together and made it a vehicle for them. And that’s much more confined. Very often episodes of bottom are just the two of them for a continuous 30 minute period. It’s it’s bleak in a way that that The Young Ones isn’t it isn’t surreal, but it does have the same slapstick violence and that kind of thing. So there’s a clear line, but you can see the whole where Lisa myers influence was.
Abigoliah: Who in The Young Ones is still alive? Because I know my boyfriend sadly passed.
Tom: That’s right. Yeah. So everyone else is still alive? Poor old Rik Mayall died in 2014. He was only 56. He hadn’t been. Yeah, he hadn’t been. Well, for a while. He fell off his quad bike and had a brain injury. And he did seem to recover from that and even did a final bottom live tour after that. But he was never quite the same again. And so, yeah, he died in 2014. Everyone else is still alive.
Abigoliah: And Robbie Coltrane passed recently.
Tom: Robbie Coltrane died in 2022. So he’s not like a core member. He just has cameos in a couple of episodes.
Abigoliah: Okay, So him and is Alexei Steele in every single one.
Tom: Alexei Sayle. Yeah. So it’s the four.
Abigoliah: I think Alexei Steele is a porn actress. Alexei Sayle, excuse me.
Tom: I wouldn’t know. Alexei Sayle plays a different character in every one.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: In the first series, he’s all the members of the family. And then in the second series, he crops up in weird places. Like here he was the revolutionary train driver.
Abigoliah: But Robbie Coltrane isn’t in every one?
Tom: He’s part of this kind of loose group of comic strip performers, which includes all of the young ones, plus Robbie Coltrane, plus Danny Peacock, plus a few other people. Kind of more at the fringes. And all of these episodes contain little cameos and people like that, even people like Hale and Pace, who are much more mainstream but were on TV around the same time.
Tom: Alexei Sayle in particular was said to be furious when he saw Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson in the studio because he was saying, he said to Paul Jackson, didn’t we say they were the enemy? Yeah. He was like, no, Alexei, you said that.
Abigoliah: But I like that they showed up to play the enemy. I one thing I really liked about it, which you don’t see in like the sitcoms I grew up with, is and I guess because it was so out there you could do this is the fact that television shows were eating themselves as far as like, we are going to have the Cambridge Footlights on, we are going to acknowledge the not the 9:00 news. I like that they were referencing other people’s comedic work in The Young Ones. I don’t know why. I just it just felt like it felt like kind of like in stand up comedy. After a show, we all go out together at the bar. It’s like, oh, they all talk to each other. They all know they’re all running in the same circles at the end of the day. So they’re all playing together on television as well.
Tom: They’re also sick of these, like I said, frilly shirt, sexist, racist comedians doing the same old jokes, and it all just felt so tired and so stale and they were so sick of it. So The Young Ones is this explosion of comedy energy. And I think the difference between this and Monty Python is you can see Monty Python coming. You can see precursor shows that very clearly are paving the way. There really have been nothing like the young ones before 1982.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: At all. Like Not the Nine O’Clock News is getting close, but it doesn’t have the same anarchic spirit. And a lot of it was pre-filmed and it’s just a sketch show when all’s said and done. Whereas this was taking the idea of a sitcom and absolutely pushing it to its limits.
Abigoliah: I will say Rik Mayall has a line delivery that the again, because I watched Drop Dead Fred is like the exact same in Drop Dead Fred, his ability to shout in a certain meter. I’m like, oh, that’s that’s what he does.
Tom: And there are some little details in his performance. Absolutely adore like in The Train when he’s having a go at Neil, he says, just because I’ve done absolutely bugger all and just making sure we know he’s big and grown up and can swear and say words like bugger, it’s just beautiful. Oh my god, such a loss.
Abigoliah: And that was a fun bit of wordplay in the train scene when they were talking about the answers, I can’t now, I can’t remember exactly how it went.
Tom: Yeah, all that back and forth. “You said not to tell you.”
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And it’s a little bit Abbott Costello. Yeah. Or actually you’ll hear something similar when we do The Goon Show. There’s a little bit of a connective tissue there. So because these guys were all comedy fans, that’s the other thing. Yeah. They weren’t rejecting everything that had come before them. They just didn’t like what was being done on mainstream television now. But they loved The Goon Show, they loved the pythons, they loved the Marx Brothers and W.C. fields and all these older comedians. They just thought that what was being served up at 7:00 on ITV was horseshit.
Abigoliah: Which brings me to like another question. So after watching Flying Circus in this, and if we look at the comedies made today, do you think the teeth has been taken out of comedy again?
Tom: Well, so there’s an idea that a comedian should be able to say anything, and the function of a comedian is to push the envelope and to say the unsayable and to push open boundaries. And when Lenny Bruce was performing in clubs and was literally being arrested on stage for saying the word blowjob.
Abigoliah: You know what? And now I will say in America, a comedian can go on, say, television and have no recourse for disagreeing with the current administration. Stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore. You don’t get arrested, you don’t get taken off air. Oh my God. What is happening in my life? Okay, sorry. Back to Lenny Bruce.
Tom: Up until very recently, yeah, there was sort of no equivalent boundary that needed to be pushed anymore, because certainly by the 90s, you literally could go on television and say anything you wanted. So kind of. What was the point? Yeah. So some of the like, we’ll come to Ricky Gervais because we’ll be doing The Office later, but Ricky Gervais or Jimmy Carr doing provocative material for the sake of being provocative feels much less valuable in this climate than it did in the 60s or 70s.
Abigoliah: I’m not even talking about, like, the politics of the shows. It’s more of like the creative jumps and the big the big leaps and the the huge choices that they make in Monty Python or the young Ones. Just to be utterly ridiculous. Like we said, they only did. They knew they were going to do two seasons of this. They left it all on the field. I feel like, although I’m sure if I go back and watch them, you see the structure emerge, okay, there’s always going to be puppets. There’s always going to be this sketch in there that really makes no sense to the rest of it. And then in an eclair will drop on University challenge
Tom: “Human beings the size of amoebas.”
Abigoliah: But like, is comedy now like television comedy way more formulaic?
Tom: I think it just becomes harder to innovate as time goes on. More and more things have have been tried, have been done. So everything watching in this first season of our podcast is innovative in some way. So even The Office, which is the most recent thing we’re watching, is something that had never been seen before. And who’s to say when the next thing that hasn’t been seen before will come along? Yeah, but it just the the space becomes more and more crowded the more people innovate. Yeah. So we’re going to be going all the way back to The Goon Show in the 1950s. And that is kind of Patient zero. Like everybody in British comedy is connected back to The Goon Show in some way, pretty much. Or they’re going all the way back to musical. But in terms of broadcasts, The Goon Show is where everything begins. And that was incredibly innovative at the time, and its influences extend on and on and on and on and on. But the more people claim a bit of the kind of idea space. Yeah, the fewer bits of uncharted territory remain.
Abigoliah: Because I guess if I’m thinking about modern day comedies and correct me if I’m wrong, the last thing that made a splash of like, there’s nothing like this is Fleabag. Yeah, Fleabag was one of those because she talked straight to camera and it’s more referential, which, you know, again.
Tom: Back and forth, by the way, including Fleabag. I had thought to include it, and I’ve finally ruled it out under my no comedy dramas.
Abigoliah: Yeah, it’s definitely a comedy drama, because I think I cried at the end of Fleabag.
Tom: Which there’s a couple of shows that you might cry at the end of here, but it’s not their purpose.
Abigoliah: Which, by the way, speaking of which, Neil, I mean played by Nigel Planer. Planer Nigel Planer is so grounded that I literally had I felt so much for him because his as crazy as this show is, he’s he’s grounded and just like accepting his lot of taking care of everyone and actually trying to do it. But he does it badly that I was like, poor guy.
Tom: Like Paul Jackson tells the same story about three times on the DVD box set, on the commentaries that an American remake was on the cards, and the producers were really struggling with it, and they rang up Paul Jackson and said, who’s the hero? And he said, what? He said, which of these characters is the audience supposed to root for? And Paul Jackson said, well, none of them. They’re all awful. That’s kind of the point. And the Americans said, listen, there has to be somebody for the audience to root for. And he said, well, I guess, Neil.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So then they retooled the scripts to kind of make Neil the sympathetic one. But in his own way, Neil’s just as much of a shit as all the others.
Abigoliah: He’s as much as a shit as the rest of them, but they all shit on him in a way. Like when they’re playing when Rik Mayall is like, “Who likes me?” And no one likes him, I don’t feel sorry for him. But also, I really went into this being like, you know, my my new boyfriend Rik, man who bit young for me and the young ones, he’s more age appropriate for me when he plays an imaginary friend ten years later. But I think I thought Rick was going to be, like, my favorite character. And he’s hilarious. They’re all hilarious, but Nigel’s my standout. Nigel’s the one that I think was my favorite character. And Neil. Neil was my favorite character in the Thing. And Mike wasn’t an original guy. They brought him in.
Tom: He’s the ringer. Yeah. So Christopher Ryan was just an actor because Peter Richardson had fallen out with Paul Jackson.
Abigoliah: I feel like you can feel that. Yeah, you can.
Tom: He’s not quite on the same page as everyone else.
Abigoliah: And he is 40.
Tom: Yes. So do you have any predictions about what the other ten episodes of The Young Ones might contain, or what the young ones might look like if it was made today?
Abigoliah: Okay, so I think there is an episode somewhere in the Young Ones because the oh, I don’t know if we want to go back and talk about this, but that second episode felt like two episodes because the first half was like, let’s do the laundry. And then the second half was let’s go on University Challenge. That’s why I asked you. I was like, was that a half hour? Because, oh yeah, a lot and a half.
Tom: So briefly, just to say about that in the first series, a lot of the episodes were coming out over length. And so Paul Jackson had to say to this was in the days children, when a television show was broadcast at a particular time, and you had to be in front of your television before it started, and then it would finish and another program would start. And the times of these programs were printed in a newspaper or magazine that you could buy. And so you knew when to be there. So a program that was commissioned for a half hour slot had to come in at like 29 minutes and 30s, and so there’d be time for a little bit of announcements either side or a trailer or something. And then on to the next one. So if your show was on at nine, there was another show coming after it at 930, but these shows were coming along. Now, if it’s 31 minutes and 15 seconds, they can probably just juggle a few things around and make it work. But if it’s 33 minutes, you kind of now need a 35 minute slot. So several of the episodes in the first series got 35 minute slots. And then for the second series, Paul Jackson just said, listen, they’re all coming in at 35. And the BBC went, yeah, fine.
Abigoliah: So that was still only 35 minutes.
Tom: Still only 35.
Abigoliah: That is a lot.
Tom: Of material in 35 minutes.
Abigoliah: That is dense.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: That’s beautiful. Yeah. Okay, so I think there’s an episode somewhere in in here. And I really do think I might have. I might have guessed right here where they realized they have to pay their rent. So Rik protests to not pay the rent because it’s capitalist and he’s an anarchist. Neil gets a job at a vegetable stand, but tries to save the vegetables instead of sell them because he doesn’t know what a vegetarian really is. Vyvyan panhandles and Mike sells Rik into servitude in order to pay the rent. Robbie Coltrane and Alexei show up in a sketch that has nothing to do with anything else. Where they play two World War Two singers a la the Andrews Sisters and the Smiths are the musical guests.
Tom: The Smiths never appeared on the show.
Abigoliah: Damn it, I really thought I might have gotten that one.
Tom: There is an episode where they run out of money.
Abigoliah: Okay, I’m not far off.
Tom: …and Neil is the one who goes out and gets a job. But it’s an even better job than the one you suggested. What is it? He gets a job as a policeman.
Abigoliah: Oh, why didn’t I think policeman. Oh, gosh, I love that.
Tom: Yeah. Not bad, not bad. All right, listen, let me tell you a little bit more about what happened To these guys after they had finished making my notebook.
Abigoliah: I’m like trying to take notes. Like. Yes, professor.
Tom: So I touched on this. It made pretty much everybody a star. Ben Elton went on to develop a career as a stand up. He appeared regularly on a show called Saturday Live, which was a channel four show that vaguely aped the more famous Saturday Night Live. And it was a showcase for a lot of up and coming comedians. A lot of people who went on to be quite famous had their first television exposure doing Saturday Live. As a writer, he was brought in to save Black Adder after a very shaky first season. He’s written about a dozen novels, several more sitcoms, including The Thin Blue Line and Upstart Crow, which is currently in the West End, and he’s written West End shows, including musicals. He wrote the book for we Will Rock you.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: So he’s also not short of a bob or two. Yeah. Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, both together and separately, dominated the British comedy landscape for years afterwards. Bottom, I think, is their crowning achievement. Rik Mayall died in 2014, but you can still see Adrian Edmondson in, for example, Alien Earth on Disney+ at the moment playing the bad guy’s heavy.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Paul Jackson produced or directed a number of innovative television comedy shows, including Red Dwarf and Girls on Top, which was kind of the the female young ones, with Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Ruby Wax all sharing a flat together. And then he became head of BBC entertainment in the 90s and director of comedy for ITV in the 2000.
Abigoliah: Wow, is he still director of comedy?
Tom: He’s retired now.
Abigoliah: Okay. Because, you know, if if he was down the lens. Big fan of yours.
Tom: Nigel Planer carried on more of a, like a straight acting career. He did a very funny spoof of a self-important acting teacher called Nicholas Craig, which was quite good fun. And Alexei Sayle continued starring in comic strip films. He had his own sketch show, Alexei Sayle’s Stuff in the 90s, which ran for three years, and he had a another single called Ullo. John got a new motor, which reached number 15 in 1982. But yeah, hugely, hugely influential. And so alternative comedy was this catchphrase and this was the most complete evocation or incarnation of that movement on television. And I think it still holds up. I don’t think it holds up quite as well as bottom, which A is a bit more recent, but also was written by two people who are now television veterans and understood what could and couldn’t be done in front of a live studio audience. Whereas as we said, these guys had no clue. They just wrote “an elephant walks in” hoping that somebody would be able to pull that off. And they were so lucky to have Paul Jackson and Geoff Posner who were able to pull it off. So I think the young ones maybe has dated a little bit worse, but I just love how exciting and ambitious it is.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, I think, like you said, because they are so new to it and it’s just like, what can we get away with? That’s when you talk about, again, like the first Saturday Night Live. It’s like they were just before they were famous. It was just like, what are we doing here? And just I yeah, I thought it was great. I really liked it. Where where is this? Where’s this that I can watch it? Or do I have to borrow your hard drive?
Tom: You might have to borrow the DVDs, but it was repeated endlessly. So when I first watched it, I imagine I would have watched the second series first, because I would have been ten when the first series went out, but 12 when the second series went out. So that would have been the perfect age. And then they were repeated a lot, so I probably would have kind of seen them all in a slightly random order and then.
Abigoliah: Wait ten and 12. So did they do what they do with series now where they, they let one out and then they’re like, no, you have to wait two years.
Tom: Yeah. They were all off doing other things because the first series made them stars. It took a while to be able to get everyone back together again.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing.
Tom: So does The Young Ones make it onto the shelf of comedy glory?
Abigoliah: Yeah. So we didn’t really explain this very in our first episode. So I just want to explain it so the shelf of glory, I’ve decided to rename it The Shelf of Fame because it sounds like Hall of Fame. So my decision right there, that’s my that’s my contribution to this entire podcast, by the way.
Abigoliah: The shelf of fame. So the rules are, dear listeners, that I am only allowed to have ten DVDs up on the shelf of fame.
Tom: And they’ll be in ranked order from best to worst.
Abigoliah: Ranked order. So as we do more episodes, eventually I’ll fill the shelf and have to take stuff on.
Tom: The shelf is bare, so you could put this anywhere you like. Yeah, it’ll be both worst and best if it goes up there. Yeah, but yeah, as as time goes on, I’ll be asking you where this sits. And then. Yes, as if the shelf gets full, you’ll have to start taking stuff down.
Abigoliah: Which reminds me. Please like subscribe, tell friends. Otherwise, we’ll never get this shelf full because we’re only watching eight.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Shows in this series. This one definitely goes on the shelf of Fame 100%. And I am going to put it first. It is first because it is the first one, but like definitely outranks Monty Python for me, I loved it, I loved it, and I will be borrowing your DVDs and buying a DVD player.
Tom: Amazing. All right, so next time, rather than going for something which is physically ambitious, there are a couple of things in this show which are quite physically ambitious, but this next show is most famous for what can be achieved just by sitting two people down in front of a camera and having them talk to each other.
Abigoliah: So it’s a podcast. It’s a podcast in 2025. Remember when it used to be audio? Yeah. And then? And then we had to get these involved. We have to do this now.
Tom: So we’re going to be watching Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Not Only But Also now as far as my curation is concerned, this one was a bit of a challenge. So firstly, not all of these shows exist because people didn’t keep television shows in the same way. They literally would wipe the tapes and reuse them. So a while ago a compilation series was put out called The Best of What’s Left of not only, but also.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which was six episodes. Some of those were just complete episodes of not only, but also and some of them were pieced together from different things that remained. So, for example, in the third series, only some of the film is still extant. All of the video has been destroyed, so they would take a little bit of the film from series three and put it with this sketch from series two and so on, but I watched all six in preparation for this. And I just thought, I actually can’t pick any of these because there’s like one brilliant sketch here. And then a typical show would have two musical numbers, would have Dudley Moore playing piano with his jazz trio and then, like Cilla Black singing a song. And I thought, why are we sitting and watching this? And then one sketch I just thought you wouldn’t get at all. So I have curated the curation. I put together my own 60 minute compilation of my favourite sketches.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And so that’s not going to be available anywhere else.
Abigoliah: So maybe what we’ll do, dear listeners, is if you send me a list of the sketches, we will post it onto our social media. All British comedy explained we are on every social media platform, but one. But one because we’ve decided to x that one out.
Tom: A lot of these individual sketches, especially the most famous ones, are available on YouTube. Yeah. So that’s a really good idea. Let’s post the list of sketches, and then people can go on YouTube and search around and see for themselves.
Abigoliah: And as we said, we’re a new podcast. So please like and subscribe on your Podcatcher app if you want to watch this podcast. We have a YouTube. We are on all social medias. Tell a friend, give us a five star review, all that. We’d really appreciate it just to, you know, get us off the ground, kids. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. I think we’re ready to go.
Tom: Yeah, I think so.
Abigoliah: All right, well, until then, goodbye. I am Abigoliah Schamaun.
Tom: And I’m Tom Salinsky. Goodbye.