MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

By: Vanessa Berry
February 8, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

THE YOUNG ONES | 1982–84

The scene: a squalid student house in 1980s London. The occupants: Rick, a self-described ‘people’s poet’ wanna-be anarchist; Neil, a chronically depressed hippie; Vyvyan, a violent punk; and Mike, suave and mysterious. Their sadistic landlord also makes regular appearances, barging in unannounced, demanding the rent.

Over the twelve episodes of The Young Ones these fractious housemates embody their own versions of the four humors, smashing and stumbling their way through student life in neoliberal Britain. Every episode has some kind of snide or overt social commentary. In the episode ‘Cash’, Rick points directly at the camera and shouts ‘I hope you’re satisfied, Thatcher!’, as the four of them argue about having burned all their furniture as firewood.

In case this sounds too serious — or as Neil would say, ‘heavy’ — it is important to know that his speech comes after a sequence of scenes of escalating ridiculousness. Neil is nailing plates to the dining table to stop Vyvyan burning them. Then Mike nails his legs to the table. Two headless ghosts drift through the house arguing. Neil serves snow as risotto for dinner. They then face up to the horror that one of them is going to have to find a job. To get out of this, Vyvyan reveals he is pregnant, leading to Rick’s speech, blaming Thatcher for the life of deprivation Vyvyan’s baby will be born into.

This description captures the surreal silliness of the show, but not the biff-bang-pow of it, the crashing and yelling, and the mood of hysterical stupidity, puerile grossness, and cartoon violence that makes it so distinct and hilarious. Not only an attack on conservatism and a satire of youth rebellion, The Young Ones often seemed to be an attack on reality itself. With abrupt diversions into meta-scenes set in Heaven, Hell, or the Middle Ages, or cutting to The Damned playing in the living room, or scenes with animate household objects — a carrot and a potato chip rollerskating around a plate in the washing-up pile, for example — the whole Young Ones world was obstructive to the sensible and orderly.

The show arose from the punk-inspired stand-up comedy scene in early-Eighties London. Episodes careen anarchically through their half-hours, with a sense that at any moment everything could fall apart. Literally — the cardboard sets, sock-puppet props, and chairs continually smashed over Rick’s head create a shoddy, low-tech aesthetic that heightens the eccentric, thrown-together energy of the series.

Watching The Young Ones now you can spot British comedy stalwarts in their early roles, including Rik Mayall and Ben Elton (who, along with Lise Mayer, wrote the series), Alexei Sayle, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, and Stephen Fry, and the show has remained a cult favourite. Coinciding with the uptake of VHS in the early ’80s, its popularity came about through being taped and rewatched. Indeed, this is how I encountered it in the 1990s. I watched the episodes over and over, embedding snippets of its absurd, insolent dialogue forever in my memory, where the four irascible housemates live on, rent-free.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

Categories

Tags