Here then is the piece printed in the Radio Times around the time of the second series:

Was it fair to send an unarmed writer on the trail of The Young Ones? In retrospect, no. But at least Johnny Black is an older and wiser man for the experience

That’s when I located a rifle butt and a brick covered in blood, real blood, in Television Centre, Studio Five, where they’d just finished filming episode one, fetchingly titled ‘Sick’. I cornered the show’s production manager, Ed Bye. ‘No, they’ve all gone off to stop Rik bleeding,’ he said consolingly. ‘Looks like he might need stitches.’ Attempting to leave the scene I opened a door and found myself in a bedroom drenched with nauseous green slime…

The first time I actually considered biting the head off a Young One was shortly after I arrived at Ashton Court Mansion in Bristol where they had been shooting episode five, ‘Time’. A burned building smouldered in the grounds, and the locals were asking if anybody had actually seen the terrorists. After all, there had been a very loud explosion. But there was no sign of the Young Ones.

As I headed back to London, I noticed something lying beside the road at a railway crossing. I swtopped the car, got out, and found a severed head. Had someone got to them before me? Looking along the line, I saw several more, and confirmed from local people that the BBC had been filming there all day.

Next day, after several angry phone calls, I established that they were in Television Centre, filming episode three, ‘Nasty’. I drove over to find another recently deserted set containing a bath full of brown sludge occupied by two copulating teddy bears, more severed heads and a video machine stuffed with toast. But no Young Ones.

A chap from the special effects team tipped me off that they were having a meal that night at an Indian restaurant in London’s Westbourne Grove with legendary punk band The Damned, their guests in that episode. I enetered the restaurant to find that they had been evicted half an hour earlier after The Damned’s Captain Sensible clambered on top of their table to perform a lengthy, tuneless rendition of ‘Happy talk’.

Drowning my sorrows with a colleague that night, I unfolded my tale of woe and was momentarily unnereved by his sharp intake of breath. ‘Didn’t you hear about the punch-up?’ he asked.

I sighed with relief. I’d heard about several punch-ups, but compared to the holocaust trail I’d been following, they seemed insignificant. Which punch-up did he have in mind? ‘Well, after they’d finnished an episode called ‘Bambi’, Nigel Planer (Neil the hippy) was beaten up by three drunks dressed as security men as he left the BBC. He was badly bruised, got a huge black eye…’

I yawned. ‘Boring,’ I said, and shambled off home, having decided to give up. As I crawled into bed, the phone rang. It was Young Ones producer Paul Jackson. ‘Listen mate,’ he said, ‘I think you could meet them tomorrow at…’ I didn’t want to know. I cut him off, shouting ‘Why don’t you go to Hell?’ ‘Done that, old son,’ he quipped. ‘Episode three.’

[NOTE: The capsule descriptions for the second series were nonsensical and presumably written by the team. Imagine the current RT allowing stuff like the following:

[NOTE (2): An early RT capsule description for the episode ‘Flood’ read as follows:

Boom boom. The funniest aspect of this capsule-description is the fact that the current Radio Times often still use it for repeat showings, but cut it short before the punchline, leaving the ‘Disaster looms…’ amusement as a genuine description of the show.

The following is a factfile first printed in the NME a long long time ago (part of their old ‘Portrait Of The Artist As A Consumer’ series, albeit with the word ‘Artist’ replaced with ‘Student’). Note how only Rick and Neil stay in character while Ade Edmonson gives his real views. Christopher Ryan was presumably not invited to take part…

A rag bag of material, written by Mayall, Elton and Mayer. Described by Rik Mayall at the time as being 'as though the publishers have given the four boys a lot of money to produce a book and this is the crap they’ve come up with’. A traditional spin-off book but with no references to plots or scripts from the TV series. Each of the characters contributes pages of their own - Rick shows us how to write a teen angst poem, Vyvian shows us how to have fun with firearms and Neil (inevitably) shows us how to cook lentils. Being not so much of a high-concept character as the other three, Mike's contributions tend to just be observations about student parties and paranoia (basically the same stuff which Ben Elton was hawking around in solo spots anyway - a fact which adds fuel to Elton's one-time wish that he should play the part of Mike in the series).

Interesting that Neil's material is here written by Mayall/Elton/Mayer despite Nigel Planer having already written his own book – Neil’s Book Of The Dead - in character. There is also a barbed comment in Batchelor Boys about propping up your TV with unsold copies of that particular tome.

Rick also pays homage to Felicity Kendal through poetry, continuing a joke which featured in 'Sick'. Mayall recorded radio spots as Rick reading the poem ('Felicity, Felicity, you fill me with electricity…') to publicise the book. Other highlights include the Cliff-heavy 'Story Of Pop' (e.g. Cliff accidentally invents Punk by changing his name to 'Cliffy Bastard' and recording a song called 'Balls Bum Poo Piss'); Leon Trotsky's 'Just Fancy That' trivia page; the revelation that swearing a lot makes your nob grow bigger (a fact attributed to a book called 'Swearing A Lot Makes Your Nob Grow Bigger' by Dr JB Strangetrousers) and the ridiculous Quotations page and its continuous allusions to John Noakes.

[NOTE: The book mentions a character called 'Monk D'Wally D'Honk' in passing. This fab collection of syllables was Hugh Laurie's incorrect University Challenge answer in 'Bambi'. ]

The following is a piece from Smash Hits, October ’84:

"It’s smut and I’m proud of it!" declared Rik Mayall. "It’s as though the publishers have given the four boys a lot of money to produce a book and this," he chuckles, " is the crap they’ve come up with."

It’s the sort of comment you’d expect from someone lounging in a swivel chair in his publishers’ plush London basement, smoking fags, picking his teeth and occasionally doodling on the brand new boardroom table with a biro. The two of us are flicking through a copy of Batchelor Boys, a book featuring the absurd antics of a rather camp poetry-reading twerp called Rick, a gormless lentil-loving hippy called Neil, a smarmy Jack-The-Lad character called Mike, and a demented punk medical student called Vyvian. In TV terms they’re better known as The Yung Ones and the book’s therefore very silly, very funny, very childish and very full of pathetic scribblings, unmentionable stains and words like "bottoms", "snot-face" and "complete and utter bastard".

It’s also the last thing The Young Ones will ever do, which seems good enough reason to discover how they got to be doing it in the first place.

Apart from a quite expensive-looking overcoat, "and the fact that I’m losing my hair and putting on weight", I doubt that Rik – now 26 – is very different from the Rik Mayall that was studying drama at Manchester University in ’75. He wanted to branch out into comedy and realised that the only way to make a start was "to be attacking something". He’d met Ade Edmonson (who plays the part of Vyv) – "very long hair at the time, torn flares, into Jimi Hendrix" – and they’d formed an act called 20^th Century Coyote aimed at deflating the Oxford & Cambridge review(sic)-type sketches that were terribly trendy at the time. Also involved were Lise Mayer (now Rik’s girlfriend) and Ben Elton (both of whom helped Rik write The Young Ones).

Ade and Rik soon began doing double acts, short plays with ludicrous titles like Death On The Toilet – "I was Death and Ade was a man called Edwyn". There was also My Lungs Don’t Work and a graveyard thriller called The Church Bazaar – A Fete Worse Than Death. While performing Death On The Toilet to packed pubs at the Edinburgh Festival in ’78, Rik, sick of watching "crap poets" perform their horribly pretentious verse, scribbled down some old rubbish on the back of an envelope, got up, read it really badly and was greeted with rapturous applause. "And that’s how the Rick character started."

Two years later, the pair of them were playing at London’s Comic Strip club doing various new routines like The Dangerous Brothers – "about two very angry guys. Ade did a character called Adrian Dangerous and the character Vyvian is a toned-down version of that."

Sharing the same stage was another double-act called The Outer Limits: one of them was Nigel Planer, who sometimes did an act as a hippy in the audience called Neil who came up on stage and made a total nerd of himself; the other was Peter Richardson who’s now in charge of the TV series The Comic Strip Presents… The four of them decided to do a ‘sitcom’ (situation comedy) about four students who lived in a house with Alexei Sayle playing the part of the landlord. Peter sketched out an idea for the Mike character, but then fell out with the TV producer, so actor Chris Ryan was roped in to play the part.

And that – pretty briefly – is how The Young Ones began.

"When we all started out," Rik explains, "it was at the same time as punk. And there was the same spirit – getting up on stage and shouting and attacking everything that was sacred. And the one thing we really wanted to attack was the whole idea of ‘youth’ that had been built up at the time, the idea of ‘everthing being OK when you’re young’ that they always foster in youth programmes. When I was young I was a complete bastard – utterly selfish, most young people are – so I wanted all the characters to be really selfish.

"The four boys are rather like a traditional sitcom family: Mike is the Dad – he’s smooth and a real prat; Neil is the Mum – he’s selfish in a passive sort of way, he moans at people rather than shout at them; Rick is the daughter – really childish and self-obsessed; and Vyv is the son – you can’t say he’s a complete bastard ‘cos he’s just got no morals at all."

They recorded one show, then had to present their BBC producers with an essay on why they thought the programme was funny in order to be allowed to make an entire series. And once they’d started screening the first six programmes, The Young Ones began to take off in a big way, mainly because there was something in it for everyone.

"That’s right, it had a very broad appeal. We didn’t want the four boys to be Young People On The Dole, we wanted them to be students ‘cos everyone hates students. Young people don’t like students, students don’t like themselves, parents don’t like students ‘cos most of them have got a son who’s like one of The Young Ones and really young people liked the cartoon quality, the slapstick. Not clowns with red noses pretending to fall over but real Laurel & Hardy-type violence. In the end, all the characters are horrible but lovable at the same time.

"I remember," he says, "going to a Channel 4 party not long after the series started. People kept coming up to me and telling me it was brilliant and I suddenly felt, wow, we’ve got something on our hands here!

"Yeuccch!" There’s a Rick-like snort of embarrassment. "That sounds really showbiz!"

Rik seems quite convinced, though, that there’ll be no more offerings from these horrible but lovable characters. He’s done two lots of The Young Ones, he says, two lots of Kevin Turvey (repeated on the recent A Kick Up The Eighties series), he’s doing his third lot of The Comic Strip Presents…for Channel 4, he doesn’t want to put out a record (as ‘Neil’ did) and he’d like to try something new.

"I was very tempted to try a one-off Young Ones for Christmas Day – imagine it, the Queen’s speech and all that, killing Santa Claus! But no, we’re not going to do any more. I want to do something – I hesitate to say it – but more grown up though that doesn’t necessarily mean ‘serious’ or ‘important’. I got a lot of letters from people saying ‘You bastard! How come you can’t be bothered to do any more Young Ones? Do you know how many people you’re disappointing?’ But we don’t want to become like Are You Being Served? or something. That’s why we stopped. You either do something ‘cos it’s a piece of art or to make money, and I’m an artiste."

And also," he adds, "we want to do something better."

This was the B-side to Cliff Richard & The Young Ones' Comic Relief single 'Living Doll'. An exclusive sketch which, though rather over-acted in parts, is still well worth an occasional spin. We'll stick it in the audio archive if anybody requests it. Until then, here's a nice transcript.

MIKE Vyvian - why did you just throw the band out of the window?

VYVIAN Oh, sorry, Mike - I was forgetting myself.

NEIL Oh wow, yeah, like I do that all the time. Like sometimes I wake up and think what's that inside my trousers. And then I remember it's me - Neil!

MIKE Now that's a very interesting sound effect, Vyv - go on, do it again.

VYVIAN Well I would, Michael, but unfortunately Neil's only got one head.

RICK Ha, good morning everybody - let's make rock n'roll history.

VYVIAN Oh no, he's found us.

RICK Hey, great gag about telling me the recording studio was in Wales!

MIKE It's time to record the flip-side.

RICK Yes, and if we don't hurry up it really will be a 'flip'-side because I'll probably say something crazy like 'oh, blummin flip, let's get on with it'!

MIKE Neil - where's your guitar?

NEIL Oh great - pop quiz. Urm…oh, it's on the tip of my tongue.

VYVIAN Well, what a stupid place to keep your guitar!

RICK Oh blummin flip, Vyvian, let's get on with it.

MIKE We are getting on with it, Rick.

RICK Well just about make sure you blinking well blummin well do, matey-flip, 'cos one thing's for def, when this cat's in the studio it's get-down-chart-time-all-the-way-to-number-one. So ha ha, haa haa Hhhhhhhffff.

MIKE Vyvian - we were gonna use that saxophone.

VYVIAN Well I just did, didn't I Michael?

RICK Oh, what a great tasting saxophone, Vyvian.

VYVIAN Well, if you think that's great, get a taste of this.

NEIL Oh good, you found my guitar, Vyv.

NEIL Oh no, guys, guys, I thought pop music was about, y'know, like, loving each other.

MIKE No Neil, that's sex. Pop music is about making money. Now go next door and steal Simon Le Bon's guitar.

NEIL Oh, okay, Mr Le Bon? Mr Le Bon…

RICK Great - we've got rid of the hippy. Brilliant - more singing from me. (sings) Get dowwn and get wi-i-i-i-i-ith it. A one, a two a three…

VYVIAN Do you want to hear my new joke?

RICK Nuh-Oh! A one, a two, a thr…

VYVIAN Look, Rick, DO (kick) YOU (kick) WANT (kick) TO (kick) HEAR (kick) MY (kick) NEW (kick) JOKE?!

RICK (Crying) Yes, I do now, Vyvian.

VYVIAN Alright, get ready to laugh 'cos here it comes!

RICK Vyvian, eating a pair of trousers is not funny - especially when they're my dungarees.

VYVIAN Do you want them back then? (Makes sicking sounds)

RICK No! No!

NEIL I'm back!

OMNES Poo - what a whiff!

NEIL Rick, why haven't you got any trousers on?

RICK Because Vyvian's turned into a comedian, Neil. Um, actually, Neil, why don't you ask Vyvian to show you his great new joke.

NEIL Oh okay, Vyvian, why don't you show me your great new joke.

VYVIAN Okay, Neil - get ready to laugh. Here it comes.

RICK Vyvian - eating my underpants is even less funny than eating me trousers.

VYVIAN (Chokes) God, you're not kidding.

RICK Neil, give me your trousers.

NEIL No, get off, get off, these are my trousers and I'm sticking to them.

RICK Just give me your trousers!

NEIL No, I can't - Vyvian put superglue in them.

VYVIAN That was three years ago, Neil.

NEIL Well how often do you change your trousers.

MIKE Now look, guys, we're running out of time. Let's get back to the important stuff.

VYVIAN You're right, Michael - Neil's trousers must be removed, and now.

NEIL Oh no, oh, oh no, what are those two horrible pale hairy things?

MIKE Those are your legs, Neil. Now come on guys, let's record the flip.

VYVIAN Right. But first… Let's have a fight!

VYVIAN That was brilliant. Now, let's do the song. Here I go.

OMNES
All the little flowers are singing
All the little birdies are too (tweet tweet)
Everything in the garden is happy
And we hope you are too
If you're happy, we're happy
And if you're sad, we're sad (boo hoo)
But now it's time to end this song
'Cos it's so (beep)ing bad

RICK Goodnight, children.

MIKE Goodnight

NEIL Hello…oh, goodnight.

VYVIAN Pass the detonator.

NEIL He's here, everybody - he's just outside the building!

RICK I simply cannot be-flipping-lieve it. Cliff Wrrritchard! The Devil Woman himself is actually going to cut hot wax with me.

VYVIAN It's fantastic. The streets are completely filled with screaming children.

NEIL All for Cliff?

VYVIAN Well, not exactly, Neil. A bomb's gone off.

MIKE You mean you let a bomb off, Vyvian?

VYVIAN Look, what I had for breakfast is completely my own affair, thank you Michael.

RICK Lordy Lordy, Vyvian! If you've whiffed out Cliff you're gonna get a pretty stingy slap on the legs before you're very much older, matey…

NEIL Look, look everyone, he's coming through the doors.

This links to the 7" version, albeit without the crashing explosion that kicked off the latter mix.

Rick's introduction is slightly longer:

RICK Hey kids, [It doesn't matter what you are - Punks, Skins, Rastas, Mods, Rockers, even Keith Chegwin - everybody everywhere] stop snogging and pay attention to me…

Later on, the guys speak over the backing track:

NEIL So here we are in the middle of the 12". It's exactly the same as the 7" really except you get 5 inches of nothing in the middle.

MIKE Mind you, it does cost an extra quid.

RICK Yeah, so listen, listeners, we got a quid off you for nothing!

VYVIAN It's still boring - I was looking forward to some raunchy guitar-licks.

RICK Alright, matey - lick this raunchy guitar.

VYVIAN Alright, I will!

FX: ELECTRICAL CRACKLES

VYVIAN Oh no! I've electrocuted my tongue!

RICK Brilliant! Stick him in a coffin before he even realises he's not dead.

NEIL Too late - Cliff's back.

CLIFF Come on, guys.

OMNES MOANS

And this links into the final chorus/verse/whatever (Lionel Bart's confusion, not ours - we are classically trained).

After the final 'utter utter utter utter (FX RECORD SCRAPE)' amusement, the joke is undermined by more dialogue.

VYVIAN Well! That's the stupid girly song over with. Now, let's steal the equipment!

RICK Well I really don't think there's anything left that you haven't already broken, Vyvian.

VYVIAN Oh, I dunno - there's a couple of legs inside your trousers still un-snapped.

MIKE Guys, guys, there's no time for that now. Now look, if we want this record to make number one we're gonna have to rig the charts.

NEIL Oh no, Mike, surely you don't mean, like, cheat.

MIKE Oh yes I do.

RICK But that's simply outrageous, Michael. It's disgusting. It's immoral. It's…how do we do it?

MIKE Simple - we find out where all the chart shops are and buy up all our records. Everybody else does it. There hasn't been a genuine number one since the Beatles split up.

NEIL Oh wow - have the Beatles split up?

RICK But this is fantastic, Michael. I'm going to be an enormous pop star. I'll probably have to go to the Bahamas to shoot my vids!

VYVIAN Anytime you want your vids shooting, Rick, you only have to ask!

RICK Oh ha ha ha, Vyvian, very clever I'm sure. Yes, let's end this wonderful project on a silly little meaningless innuendo.

VYVIAN Alright…

And there it ends.

[NOTE: The promo video for the song featured much of the same dialogue as the 7" but some was reperformed on camera to avoid the shortcomings of dialogue-miming. Other notable differences were in Rick's opening monologue which encompassed the 'Keith Chegwin' amusement of the 12" and an alternative interruption to the 'utter utter utter utter…' joke (here, Rick gets hit on the head with a mallet by Vyvian who has also just silenced Cliff, Neil and Mike in the same manner. The video ends with him turning the mallet on himself. We seem to remember that there were two slightly differing versions of the video - one of which didn't feature Vyvian's instrument-wreaking over Hank Marvin's guitar solo. The visuals of both versions featured Rick pretending to play the solo in question before being unmasked as a charlatan.]

[NOTE: The Young Ones' live performance of the song at the Shaftsbury Avenue is dealt with in EDIT NEWS/COMIC RELIEF.]

There have been mercifully very few parodies of the Young Ones. Spitting Image once did the most pointless sketch ever written which featured the Conservative government as the characters (this being in the 90s, about a decade after The Young Ones first went out). Not untypical of Spitting Image which, by that time, had cast off the fantastic personality of earlier series and adopted a rather obvious Week Ending-style remit

Phil Cool used to do a dull routine as part of his stand-up impressions act which showed that his ‘Vyvian’ and ‘Alexei Sayle were great’ , his ‘Mike’ was pretty ropy and his ‘Rick’ was bloody awful. He presumably realised he couldn’t do ‘Neil’, so limited him to one line:

PHIL COOL (As himself) Did anybody see The Young Ones? (Audience replies in the affirmative) Great film, wasn’t it, eh? (Laughter) Now if anybody deserves a medal for being around so long it must be Cliff, eh?

AS CLIFF (Sings) I got myself a cryin’, talkin’, singin’, walkin’ livin’ doll...(Mimes inflating a blow-up woman; doll then leaves his lips and deflates amusingly). Hi. D’you know, I feel sorry for The Young Ones. I mean, having to live in the squalor of that bombed-out, rat-infested Victorian house in London. I mean, gosh fellas, how Balowski can charge rent for that sort of place I’ll never know. Meanwhile, back at the house...

AS VYVIAN I am bored...bored...bored. This third series of The Young Ones is completely boring.

AS MIKE Well why don’t you do what you usually do when you’re bored, Vyv, and start spewing up gallons of florescent green vomit all over everybody?

AS VYVIAN Alright, Michael. (Addresses his middle finger) You are going on a long, dark journey. (Beckons the finger towards his throat; the finger obliges) Bleeuuurghhhh...

AS MIKE Hold it, Vyv, I was only kidding. Only the producer’s tryin-a give the show a more general appeal, so he’s tryin-a cut down on the vomit and the violence and all the shouting.

AS VYVIAN I had noticed, Michael. I’ve only been scripted 15 bottom burps, and I’ve only shouted ‘bastard’ 76 times...and at only 250 bastard decibels.

AS RICK (Much laughter from the audience as they recognise the facial expression first) Must you always be a complete spazmo, Vyvyan?

AS VYVIAN Oh dearie me. Prick has spoken.

AS RICK I resent that remark! I resent that remark, matey boy. And it’s Rick, Riiiiick...not what smarty bottom Vyvyan said. And I’m ever such a nice person, really...aren’t I everybody? And I, Rick, Riiiiick...shall liberate the kids of Britain from Thatcherism.

AS MIKE Sorry to interrupt this noble speech, Rick, but any minute now Balowski’s gonna come chargin’ through that door demanding his rent money.

AS ALEXEI (As Jerzy Balowski) Boys! It’s me, Balowski! I’ve come to collect the rent money!

AS RICK Well we haven’t got it, Balowski, so you can’t have it.

AS NEIL (Doing dual peace signs) Yeah, you tell him, Rick. Yeah.

AS RICK What’s the matter, you want some more...fascist? (Mimes poking Jerzy’s eyes out)

AS ALEXEI (As himself) As a matter of fact I do, yes. Recite yer alphabet backwards, right? But don’t forget to pronounce yer R, or I’ll bit yer ’ead off, right? Now this is the part of the show that really flows naturally, like, y’know, and I go off on a wild tangent and start recitin’ me stage act parrot-fashion, like, ’cos I’m not really a maniacal landlord, y’know - I’m a comedian, an alternative comedian. (Silly voice) Now I’m funny, now I’m not! Now I’m funny, now I’m not! (Does silly noise to the rhythm of ‘Now I’m funny, now I’m not’) Hello Balowski, gotta Toshiba...sorry fer nickin’ yer tune. Hello Alexei, gotta Toshiba - sorry fer nickin’ yer tune.

[NOTE: The ‘Toshiba’ reference alludes to a famous advert of the time which appropriated Alexei Sayle’s ‘Ullo John, Got A New Motor’.]

A non-offensive pastiche came from Radio Active’s parody of Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’ (another allusion to Mr Richard and inflatable women) which ends with Young Ones-esque characters thanking him. ‘Heyy, fellahs, why don’t you (beep) off’ says Cliff. ‘You bastard – don’t you call me a fellah!’ retorts a Vyvian impression.

Another pretty good parody appeared in Mad magazine. The magazine in question has been running since the 50s and each issue features comic strip spoofs of contemporary films and TV shows. A British edition of the magazine (now folded) featured lots of the original American material (often clumsily Anglicised – refs to Johnny Carson replaced by Terry Wogan and the like) plus some exclusive home-grown stuff. The Young Ones spoof was a six page strip written by someone we can’t remember the name of and illustrated by David Stoten (an artist who also worked extensively on Spitting Image).

As is Mad magazine’s limiting self-enforced remit, the show’s title and character names are given parodic puns. The title was ‘The Young Bums’ and the characters were given the names ‘Wreck’, ‘Nil’, ‘Veralynn’ and ‘Muck’… (their landlord was called ‘Mr Bukanowski but was generally referred to as ‘Alexei Sellout’). The script itself was up to Mad magazine standards (i.e. a bit rubbish) but the writer did at least make references to things which weren’t immediately obvious to the casual Young Ones viewer (e.g. a direct parody of Sayle’s live stand-up rather than the character he played) so he must have been a fan.

At some point we’ll include excerpts – we have to find the right cardboard box first. Still, we did find all those back issues of Smash Hits so you’re laughing really…

Another parody very much worth mentioning features in Pamela Stephenson’s book How To Be A Complete Bitch. One item parodies the Batchelor Boys cover (with Stephenson as Rick, Neil and Vyvian and a dwarf actor as Mike). The text bitterly slags off alternative comedy’s reliance on fart-gags (‘a quote here’) but the views expressed are hardly those of Stephenson. In fact the book was a sister-volume to Ade Edmonson’s How To Be A Complete Bastard (both books co-written by Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine and published by Virgin) and the vitriol was simply a routine come-back for the parody of the Not! book which featured in Edmonson’s tome.

[NOTE: How To Be A Complete Bastard spawned a follow-up book (The Bastard’s Book Of The Worst – written without Leigh and Lepine and therfore really crap) and a board game. Probably a computer game too, come to think of it.]

[NOTE (2): Oh yeah – here’s something. Ade Edmonson, Leigh and Lepine were the subject of a Candid Camera-style hoax perpetrated by That’s Life a few months before …Bastard came out. In it, Richard Branson (who was in on the joke) tells the writers that the book can’t be published unless they change the name (to fit in with a cleaner image he claimed he wanted for Virgin – something like that). He suggested name changes like ‘How To Be Rather Horrid’, etc, to not-very-funny reactions. The fake TV listings page in …Bastard thereafter featured a few very unkind allusions to That’s Life as a revenge tactic. Well, okay, the jokes were probably there in the first place, but it’s nice to stir things up. Yeah, like we’re gonna create a fucking rift between Edmonson and Rantzen based on a TV hoax nobody else remembers. Stick to the facts, stick to the facts…]

Since the characters in The Young Ones are based on high-concept stand-up acts, the writers presumably didn’t bother grafting too much background detail onto their sitcom lives. We don’t learn too much about their origins, except where it alludes to a bit of spontaneous amusement.

‘Rick’s full name is never divulged.

‘Mike’ is only ever refered to as ‘Mike (The Cool Person)’

‘Vyvian’s full name is revealed in Batchelor Boys as ‘Vyvian Basterd’ which is of course a rubbish throwaway joke.

‘Neil’, meanwhile is the only character to be given a full name. First revealed during promo for ‘Hole In My Shoe’, it is ‘Neil Weedon Watkins Pye’. Interestingly, the name must always have been on the cards as Mike addresses Neil’s mother (in ‘Sick’) as ‘Mrs Pye’. The spelling of the surname may have been influenced by the record label of that name, which released many of folk/pop singer Donovan’s LPs. The Weedon presumably comes from guitarist Bert Weedon.

[CUTENESS: an eight-year-old we used to know thought that Neil’s full name was ‘Neil Young’ (as in the vaguely reactionary Canadian singer) and that the characters were siblings – Rick Young, Mike Young, Vivian Young and Neil Young. Thus, collectively, ‘The Young Ones’.]

Vyvian’s mother features twice in the series, played by Pauline Melville. Father unknown.

Neil’s parents appear in ‘Sick’. He also has a brother called Geoff, to whom he addresses a poem in ‘Neil’s Book Of The Dead’. Geoff is the antithesis of Neil, is quite violent, drinks a lot and collects guns. The family are quite well off and Neil’s hippiness is a vague reaction to this (in ‘Book Of The Dead’ an article shows us how to turn your bedroom into a squat, during which his parents disconnect the electricity to his room). Neil’s mother also appears on Neil’s Heavy Concept Album (played by Barbara Gaskin). Also has an uncle called ‘Dusty’…

Rick’s parentage are revealed to have recently died in ‘Summer Holiday’. They are obviously reactionary Tory-supporters which accounts for Rick’s guilt-fuelled radicalism. He is also an only child, (as revealed in ‘Bambi’) and has been spoiled rotten.

No info on Mike’s parents, obviously…

Jertzy Balowski’s family are of course scattered all over the place, although one should always remember that Alexei Sayle’s characters are simply extensions of his stand-up act and shouldn’t take too much time dissecting the dramatic links. Which does rather render this whole article a waste of time. Still, there was nothing on the telly, We’d had all the wanks we could comfortably have today and that pasta bake won’t be ready for another half-hour yet. What else can we write? Urm…

Does anybody want all the interesting production details from that Young Ones shooting script?  Next update perhaps...