"The early 1980s saw many exciting, mould-breaking shows hit TV screens " ""Bruce Forsyths Play Your Cards Right" ,"Training dogs the Woodhouse way", and "Take the High Road" to name none of them." "Into this steaming cauldron of artistic experiment stepped a group of talented young writers and performers eager to break the rules and say the words "you bastard" as often as possible in any given show." "They were the first wave of Comedy Store and Comic Strip veterans." "It was no surprise that that promiscuous old tart television wanted to pick them up and have her way with them." "It was relationship that started not with a bang, but with a boom-boom." "No kidding, I'm ready to fight" "Paul Jackson was one of the first producers to come sniffing around." "I've been looking for my baby all night" "Paul said, "Do you want to go on telly?"." "I said, "Yes."" "If I get her in my sight." "Having gone to see this for pleasure, I thought, "This is going to be huge."." ""We got to do something about this, we got to get it on television."" "Boom!" "Boom!" "Out go the lights!" "Paul came to an alternative cabaret gig" "I think that was in a student bar at six o'clock, and the bar wouldn't open, so everybody sat there drinking milk while I shouted at them." "They put wires in your head." "What?" "Me, paranoid?" "I thought, "Oh, man!"" "It was like, "The guys from the BBC are here!"." "And it was just terrible." " Didn't you kill my brother?" " I took it forward to the BBC, who to be honest didn't know what I was talking about." "And how would they." "Nobody had really heard about this." "René Descartes was a very clever man." "He invented the philosophical concept, "I'm zinc, therefore I'm a pram."" "I suppose it was so different that anything we did would be striking to those few people who saw us, but I imagine it was pretty lame." "("SPACE INVADERS" SOUNDS)" "I can't remember what the audience was, a million or something, but there's another measure that the BBC and broadcasters in general take, which is called the appreciation index, which is they ask people who watched it did they like it?" "If you get 50, it's not too good, if you get 80's great." "We got 33." "I think it was the lowest ever in the history of television at that time." "We wrote deliberately offensive, bad, weird stuff, and we'd scream terrible jokes." "This is an angry love poem that I've written, and it's called "Vanessa"." "(LAUGHTER)" "Shut up!" "People would start giggling at how bad it was." "Then I'd yell at them, and then they would laugh and try and hide, and that's where Rick came from, really." "I think Special Patrol Group is a stupid name for a hamster." "OK I'll change it then." "Hello, Cliff Richard." "Bastard!" "Rik had come to see me - at that time I was the only television bloke he knew - and he came to see me and said, "Look we've got this idea for a sitcom." "Would you be interested?" I said, "Yes of course."" "So he and Lise Mayer wrote this sitcom called "The Young Ones"." "(SCREAMS)" "Our big model was "Fawlty Towers", which seemed to succeed as a sitcom not just because it was brilliantly written and had a great character, but because it didn't make its characters likeable." "Oh, thanks a lot, Vyvyan!" "You know I'm a vegetarian." "What I wanted was to..." "not to recreate, but to have the same intense excitement that the Pythons had, where you watch it and you just didn't know what was going to happen next." "He looks well on it, don't he." "So I said, "This is fantastic." "It's not there yet." "It's not a script yet."" "Oh!" "I could murder a curry!" "(FARTS)" "Rik said, "I've been thinking of getting this bloke called Ben Elton who writes a play a week, y'know, just is always producing plays." "He knows how to shape and write stuff." "Do you mind if we get him in?"" "And I went home that night and wrote and wrote and wrote, and the next day, I took a script to them of what was sort of basically the basis of "Demolition", the first episode." "If the kids are united, we will never be divided." "Did you see that?" "!" "Did you?" "!" "The voice of youth!" "They're still wearing flared trousers!" "I was sent the script of "The Young Ones" , and this thing arrived, covered in Marmite stains, and half written in pencil, illiterate, and full of Ben Elton's terrible spelling." "Rather like Monica Lewinsky' dress, it had strange stains all over it, and I could not make head or tail of this." "Hello, everybody!" "I'm the Easter Bunny!" " But it' June 12th." " What?" "It's the middle of summer, Big Ears!" "(LLOYD) It was full of brilliant ideas, but so incompetently put together, you'd think, "If I did this, I'd try and structure it, make it neat."" " I'm really sorry." " It would have destroyed it, really." "I really screwed that up, didn't I." "I should think I'd look pretty stupid if anyone was watching." "(JACKSON) It had all kinds of quirky elements, already that first script, but I said if we just put a band in or something, because then we'll be a variety show and we'll get slightly more money." "I'm depressed." "It's Nine Below Zero." "So we put Nine Below Zero in, playing in the boys' room." "Anyway, we made the first show, and we were thrilled with it." "And we said to each other, "We've got what we set out to get."." "And it sat there for quite a long time." "Then what happened was, Channel 4 by this time were on the horizon." "Jeremy Isaacs announced his first night's line-up, and it included "The Comic Strip"." "And somebody somewhere in the BBC said, "That's that lot we've got on that tape."" "Suddenly, I got this phone call, "Can you make five more?"" "Why won't it go off, Mike?" "The characters in "The Young Ones" were based on real people that we'd known when we were students." "Pollution..." "All around..." "That's what Rick is all about - trying to fit in with the group, the Revolutionary Front, and failing." "...sometimes up sometimes...down." "There was a lot of stuff I was trying to sublimate in myself, sort of arsey behaviour, which kind of came out in Rick." "I was always trying to stay cool and keep that twerp down, and the only way to live with that was to let him out." "Are you suggesting that we make a profit out of nuclear arms?" "Yes." "Oh I think that would be very fine behaviour for a Cliff Richard fan!" "For someone who actually thinks the lyrics of "Devil Woman" have got something to say." "I liked falling through the roof with Ade, that was absolutely terrifying." "We were lying on the bed like this, with our backs facing the floor," "I don't know, 30ft up, something like that, 40 maybe, watching this wire." "One of the reasons Ade's great is 'cause he's got the balls of a giant." "They're really big..." "But also he's brave is the point." "I'm shitting myself." "This explosion's going to go off here, bang, and we going to fall." "Free fall to the floor." "And when we hit the floor, Paul says, "Soon as you hit the floor, soon as you feel the floor, start fighting, OK?"." "Then we'd get into the fight routine." "I was so scared!" "I said, "Ade, I think I'm gonna die."." "He turned to me and said, "Good."." "I am not a virgin!" "I am not a virgin!" "Virgin!" "Virgin!" "That was the most terrified I've ever been in my life." "More terrified than falling off a quad bike." "I was unconscious, 's all, wasn't scared." "And when I came back, I was Jesus." "Bad karma." "I think in terms of Rik and Ade's act, which is the slapstick act, they always need a victim to hit over the head with a frying pan." "Yes, he's a victim... but actually, there's a lot of bottled up aggression in there, too." "Anything where Neil threw a tantrum or became worked up about something," "I find very funny, because it's so ineffective and useless." "I'm not into violence, Rick, but I'm really going to smash your face in!" "No!" "No!" "Neil!" "How are you keeping that flowerpot up?" "The original idea was Pete Richardson should play what was to become Mike." "Pete was and is a strangely cool guy." "(JAZZ)" "What happened subsequently was that Peter Richardson and Paul Jackson had some kind of major falling out." "This is actually very serious." "So we then had a fourth character with no one to play him, which was why we ended up casting Chris Ryan as Mike." "I know what you're thinking, baby, and if I was to tell you, you'd think I was talking in centimeters." "And I handled that wrong, I was a kid, first thing I'd ever done, on the other hand it didn't need to be as a long a row as it was." "All right." "Somebody call a taxi?" "They asked me to be in it, 'cause I'd been the kind of..." "Just 'cause I..." "I think they were frightened of me, really." "Exterminate!" "Exterminate!" "I said that I didn't want to get stuck as a character or some crap, so they'd leave a hole in the script and I'd fill it during rehearsal, with bits of my act or some crap that I'd made up." "I live in a tower block, and there's a terrible noise problem." "There's no noise insulation, and eight floors below, there's always some bastard with a Yamaha home organ." "We had no real idea of how difficult it had been for Paul to get it on," "I think, 'cause we thought, "Yeah, we're brilliant." "They'll put it on."" "Over the twelve, I think the BBC were incredibly supportive." "I mean, it was challenging at the time." "Most particularly in the first series, the one we felt really strongly about, was what I still think is one of the great comic scenes, which is when the super-cool Rick, who's holding the party," "and who'se got all his mates standing up.." " Anyone got a straight?" " A what?" " A cigarette." " Oh, sure." " What a great bag!" " Because nobody turns up and everyone's got nothing to do, he opens a girl's handbag." "That old thing that we were all taught..." "Every young boy was taught never look in a lady's handbag, you don't know what you'll find." "And he gets out a Tampax, and he doesn't know what it is." "The supercool dude in his yellow dungarees doesn't know what it is." "And it was, I thought, a very funny scene, and he's completely left looking like a completele tit." "It's a telescope." "A telescope with a mouse it!" "Brilliant!" "(SINGS) Dum de-dum de-dum de-dum... (SILLY VOICE) Hello, Riannon." "Are you glad you could come to the party?" "Here, have a drink, mousie." "Dum de-dum de-dum..." "Oh, it's gone all big." "I'll get a tissue, it's alright." "There's a whole box of them." "They're called..." "I'd better go to the lavatory." "We were very committed to the scene." "We knew there'd be difficulty about it." "We delivered all six, they were reviewed by Jim Moir and he said," ""I'm not arguing." "We'll go with that." ""It's extremely funny." "The context it's in..."" "We were ready to take our names off the credits." "In that way, the BBC were very good." "On the other hand, classically BBC, he then said, "One thing has to go - the scene where Ade fucks the floor."" "We looked at each other and said, "I'm sorry, Jim." "What do you mean?"" "Hi, girls." "We racked our brains and realized what it was." "We said, "That's nonsense." "He's doing press-ups to show off."" "Do you want to see how many press-ups I can do?" "He said, "Well, last time I fucked the wife it looked like that."" "It was about getting off with girls, masturbation, going to the toilet, and farting, and it was quite schoolboy humour in a lot of ways." "We're all going on a summer holiday" "No more working for a week or two" "Fun and laughter on a summer holiday... (WAILS TUNELESSLY)" "I think I liked the last episode of all, where they go over the cliff." "Look out!" "Cliff!" "(BRAKES SCREECH)" "It was just such fun killing them all off and destroying everything." "So cruel and pointless, so I enjoyed that." "(ALL) Phew!" "That was close."