The Young Ones – a comedy revolution

We follow our episode on arguably the most influential comedy group of the early 1970s with one on arguably the most influential comedy group of the 1980s, but for me there’s a key difference.

You can see Monty Python coming.

The Monty Python team was so popular, so successful and so influential – the original shows so often repeated, and the material remixed and reprised in movies, books, record albums, live shows and so on – that it’s easy to forget all the precursors. But John Cleese for example had been regularly appearing on television for almost ten years by the time Monty Python’s Flying Circus started.

And it isn’t just shows like The Frost Report in which he and Graham Chapman were part of the acting ensemble. At Last the 1948 Show with Cleese, Chapman, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor clearly demonstrates an early version of the “Cambridge” side of Python with lots of the comedy of frustration and escalation. One of these sketches is so obviously “Python-esque” that it became a mainstay of Python stage shows, even though it was first broadcast in 1967, two years before the name “Monty Python” had been thought of – the Four Yorkshireman, which most people assume is a Flying Circus sketch.

And over on ITV, Terry Jones and Michael Palin were exploring what would become the “Oxford” side of Python on Do Not Adjust Your Set, which also included Eric Idle, just in case anyone wanted a monologue full of dense wordplay. They even had Terry Gilliam animations.

So the original Monty Python’s Flying Circus seems like an evolution of a brand of comedy which was already very familiar. It’s just that this particular group did it better and then kept on doing it, long after the original TV show finished.

But if you were watching BBC2 in November 1982 and The Young Ones appeared – nothing could have prepared you for it. Even if you were one of the four people who had watched the cabaret show Boom Boom Out Go The Lights a couple of years earlier, you still would have been rocked back on your heels by the detonation of wild surrealism, cartoon violence and extraordinary characterisations which suddenly lit up the screen.

None of Mayall, Planer, Edmondson and Sayle were quite doing their first telly appearances. All had been in Boom Boom, Mayall had done Kevin Turvey (which Edmondson had also appeared in), Planer had had a couple of acting roles and Sayle had been featured quite prominently in Whoops Apocalypse (which has just a hint of the go-for-broke energy of The Young Ones, but is nothing like as focused). But for most viewers, this was their first chance to see what live audiences had been lapping up in Soho for several years.

Even Not the Nine O’Clock News didn’t really pave the way, having more in common with the iconoclastic satirists of the 1960s than the pure punk energy of The Young Ones. John Lloyd wanted to bring down the government, but only Vyvyan Basterd would dare take on Felicity Kendall.

And sure, it looks a bit dated now. Bottom has certainly worn better. But I still watch The Young Ones and remember the ice water freshness of its impact over forty years ago.

Do you remember the impact that The Young Ones made? Were you a fan of Bottom who only saw The Young Ones later in life? Does anyone other than me remember Filthy Rich and Catflap? Let me know in the comments.