By the early 1980s, a new generation of British comedians had found a home for themselves at the Comic Store in London’s Soho, a breed of comic more interested in the surreal, the anarchic and the provocative than the rather safe rut that much British television comedy had fallen into at the time. Among these performers were three double acts, 20th Century Coyote (Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall who later rebranded as The Dangerous Brothers), French and Saunders (Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders) and The Outer Limits (Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson), as well as solo acts like Arnold Brown, Ben Elton, Paul Merton and many others. Richardson, having failed to get a play off the ground that he was trying to produce, launched a cabaret night at the Raymond Revuebar’s Boulevard Theatre that he dubbed The Comic Strip, taking Sayle and the double acts with him. The group was a hit and went on a national and international store before Richardson persuaded the newly appointed Channel 4 youth-and-entertainment commissioning editor Mike Bolland to commission a series of Comic Strip films for the channel, a series broadcast under the umbrella title The Comic Strip Presents… (1982-2016).

At the same time, Mayall, his then girlfriend Lise Mayer and Elton had started work on their own anarchic comedy series about a group of unruly students sharing a house. Bringing Sayle, Planer and Edmonsdon with them, they launched The Young Ones onto an unsuspecting BBC Two audience on 9 November 1982. While this most unusual of sitcoms went on to be one of the most beloved by the young generation it was aimed at, it had a slow start in the ratings, the first four episodes failing to crack the top ten. But it’s heady mix of surreal sight gags, talking animals, anarchic mayhem, political satire and sheer silliness eventually won through and by the time of the belated second series in 1984 it was regularly the second or third most watched programme on the channel for its week.

The premise was simple enough. Four students – and pretentious pseudo-radical poet and Cliff Richard fan Rik (Mayall), dangerously psychotic Vyvian (Edmondson), hippie Neil (Planer, a development of a character he’d first tried out on stage at the Comedy Story) and “cool person” and wide boy Mike (Christopher Ryan, taking the role after Richardson turned it down under the mistaken belief that producer Paul Jackson didn’t like him) attend Scumbag College, studying sociology and/or domestic sciences, medicine, Peace Studies and a subject never actually determined respectively and share a house together, an abode destroyed in the first episode necessitating a move to an even less salubrious address in the second.

A mysterious fifth flatmate turned up throughout the first series, never moving, sitting quietly in the background, hair draped forward over his face like Sadako from Ringu (1998). The character was largely unnoticed by audiences (and some cast members it seems) for many years until he was finally spotted. Various writers and production team members denied that it ever existed but it’s clearly visible in almost every first season episode and in 2018, Edmondson claimed that he was played by Mark Dewison who also played Neil’s hippie friend, also named Neil, in the episode Interesting, though towards the end of that same episode the alternate Neil and the fifth flatmate appear in the same shot together…

The mysterious fifth flatmate seen sitting against the back wall in the first episode, Demolition.

Not a great deal actually happens in each of those episodes as the housemates argue, attempt to inflict serious injuries on each and get involved in increasingly outlandish scrapes. Subliminal images occasionally flash past, bands like Motorhead, Madness, Dexys Midnight Runners, The Damned and others played live in various parts of the flat (this qualified the series for variety show status that brought it a larger budget than would have been available to a straightforward sitcom) and along the way the housemates meet Vyvian’s highly aggressive talking pet hamster Special Patrol Group, encounter aliens, find a nuclear bomb in their kitchen, Vyvian visits Narnia, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse pop up, they appear on student quiz show University Challenge (1962-), are stalked by midgets from Hell… And that’s just the start of it.

Its mix of slapstick violence and wild, imaginative plots was quite unlike anything else seen on British television to that date. It subverts all existing sitcom conventions (in the episode Sick, Vyvian has a fine old rant about The Good Life (1975-1978) – “It’s just so bloody nice!”), plays games with the conventions of television itself (characters frequently break the fourth wall to address the audience directly) and the plots frequently take bizarre detours that have nothing to do with the main story. Fellow Comic Strip performers would turn up along the way – French, Saunders, Elton, Stephen Frost, Mark Arden and others guested while Sayle turned up frequently as members of the Balowski family, related to landlord Jerzy.

It eventually became a huge hit, mainly due to the many repeats on both mainstream and cable television and there were video game spin-offs, records (a re-recording of the title song with original singer Cliff Richard was a hit, as was a cover of Traffic’s Hole in My Shoe by “Neil”) books based on the series and an American remake, Oh, No! Not THEM! featuring Planer as Neil, Jackie Earle Haley as Adrian and Robert Bundy as Mike but although a pilot was shot in 1990 for the Fox network, it never went to series. In the UK, the key creatives made several shows in a similar vein – the four main characters turned up in a Comic Relief stage show in 1986, Mayall, Planer, and Edmondson teamed up with writer Ben Elton again in 1986 for Filthy Rich & Catflap while Mayall and Edmondson’s were occasionally joined by Ryan in Bottom (1991-1995).

But good though they were, they couldn’t match the comic genius of The Young Ones. It alienated parents who simply did get it (Rik, obsessed with doing things for “the kids” would have been proud) but the younger, post-punk audience at which it was aimed loved it. It was so unlike anything else on television at the time (contemporary British sitcoms included Hi-de-Hi! (1980-1988), Only Fools and Horses (1981-2003) and ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-1992), all very traditional in structure and tone) and although some of the contemporary humour (references to Margaret Thatcher abound and there’s a whole episode built around the “video nasties”, complete with Sayle as a South African vampire) has dated, the sheer silliness of the mayhem means that it still holds up well enough today. Let’s be honest, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson taking lumps out of each other in the name of comedy will always be funny…