49 Fun Facts About The Young Ones TV Series

Which third writer, then Mayall's girlfriend, co-wrote The Young Ones with him and Ben Elton?

Lise Mayer. She and Mayall wrote the first drafts as a couple, and Ben Elton was then brought in to expand their ideas into working scripts.

Which channel first showed The Young Ones in 1982, a week after its new rival Channel 4 went on air?

BBC2. Channel 4 had opened with a film made by the same group of comedians, and the BBC answered a week later with its own show starring them.

The Young Ones' twelve-episode run matched which 1970s BBC sitcom?

Fawlty Towers. Both made two series of six, and The Young Ones built much of its following afterwards, through repeats and well-worn home video tapes.

Which character, played by Adrian Edmondson, was the violent punk medical student?

Vyvyan. In one episode he ignores the warning signs, leans out of a train window and loses his head, which then lies on the track shouting abuse at his own body.

In The Young Ones, what was the name of the punk housemate's talking Glaswegian hamster?

Special Patrol Group. SPG for short, the hamster shared its name with a Metropolitan Police riot unit that was a byword at the time for heavy-handed policing.

Rik Mayall's character Rick was a self-proclaimed anarchist and devoted fan of which singer?

Cliff Richard. Rick flies into a rage at any slight against his hero, and the series borrowed both its title and its theme song from one of the singer's early hits.

Which food does the hippie housemate Neil cook so often in The Young Ones that it became his trademark?

Lentils. In the very first episode Rick refuses Neil's casserole on learning that the lentils are South African, a nod to the boycotts of the apartheid years.

Which Young Ones star came from outside the comedy-club circuit, as a late replacement for Peter Richardson?

Christopher Ryan. Richardson was first choice for Mike but dropped out, by one account after clashing with the producer and by another to work on his own projects, so an actor from outside the group stepped in.

At which fictional institution are the four students of The Young Ones supposedly enrolled?

Scumbag College. Nobody is ever seen at a lecture, but the four do represent it on a television quiz, turning up two weeks late and unwashed.

What kind of car does the punk housemate drive in The Young Ones, painted yellow with flames up the sides?

Ford Anglia. In the first episode its owner brings home an amputated leg from the college morgue and plans to mount it on the bonnet.

What is the name of the students' landlord in The Young Ones?

Jerzei Balowski. The same actor played a whole family of Balowskis across the series, and the landlord's Russian accent was put on because he thought it sounded sophisticated.

Why did most Young Ones episodes include a live band?

To qualify as variety and get a bigger budget. The series was made and funded by the BBC's variety department, not comedy, so most weeks a band turned up in the house or the street outside.

Which band appeared in two episodes of The Young Ones?

Madness. They played 'House of Fun' in the first series, where the singer answers Rick's request for another song by threatening to smash his face in, and returned with 'Our House' in the second.

Which band plays in the living room in The Young Ones episode 'Bambi'?

Motörhead. They blast through 'Ace of Spades' in the front room while the four housemates, still in their filthy clothes, charge past them to catch a train.

The Young Ones episode 'Bambi' sends up which student quiz show?

University Challenge. The four housemates are drawn against Footlights College, Oxbridge, a team of braying aristocrats played by rising stars from a rival comedy set.

Which future Oscar winner played Miss Money-Sterling, of the Footlights College team, in The Young Ones?

Emma Thompson. She and two of her team-mates had come up through the real Cambridge Footlights, so the braying Footlights College team was played by genuine graduates of the club.

In The Young Ones, which comedian played the quiz host 'Bambi', a spoof of Bamber Gascoigne?

Griff Rhys Jones. His Bambi refuses to let the students win, then openly favours the other team, accepting wrong answers and a £50 bribe.

How does the final episode of The Young Ones end for the four?

Their bus goes over a cliff. Fleeing a bungled bank raid in a stolen double-decker, they smash through a billboard of Rick's idol and off the edge, and the bus explodes.

Which 1959 hit did the Young Ones cast re-record with its original singer for Comic Relief in 1986?

Living Doll. Despite the gulf between the anarchic comics and the clean-cut star Rick worshipped, he agreed to join them, and the remake spent three weeks at number one.

Which veteran Radio 1 disc jockey appears in The Young Ones as God?

Alan Freeman. He plays God in two episodes, and in the last one strikes the landlord dead for telling prospective tenants that the wrecked house is a great place to live.

Nigel Planer, in character as Neil, reached number 2 in 1984 with a cover of which Traffic song?

Hole in My Shoe. The dreamy 1967 single, with its spoken fairy-tale interlude, suited the gloomy hippie perfectly, and his cover stalled at number two exactly as the original had.

Which film by the same gang of comedians went out on Channel 4's opening night, a week before The Young Ones began?

Five Go Mad in Dorset. The Enid Blyton send-up, with Adrian Edmondson among its Famous Five, launched the new channel's comedy, and the BBC hurried its own series onto the air a week later.

Most of The Young Ones' exterior scenes were filmed in which English city, despite the north London setting?

Bristol. The student house is a real one on a street corner in the suburb of Bishopston, and the launderette where the four try and fail to wash their filthy clothes is round the corner.

In The Young Ones, what is the name of the pub where the punk housemate's mum works?

The Kebab and Calculator. The four troop there out of sheer boredom in the first series, and the barmaid turns out to be the punk's long-lost mother.

How does the very first episode of The Young Ones end?

A plane crashes into the house. The four spend the episode fighting a council demolition order, which becomes pointless when the aircraft flattens the house and everyone in it.

The Young Ones' second series hid 'subliminal' single frames in its episodes, including the end credits of which film?

Carry On Cowboy. Its closing credits flash by during 'Bambi', and the frames hidden in other episodes are just as random: the joke was on the scare of the day about secret messages on screen.

What grand title does Rick give himself in The Young Ones when he pictures the nation mourning his death?

The People's Poet. The character grew out of Rik Mayall's club act, in which he recited pretentious verse and scolded the audience for failing to appreciate it.

Which London club, set up by future Young Ones stars with French and Saunders, caught Channel 4's attention?

The Comic Strip. The acts broke away from the Comedy Store in 1980 and set up in a theatre inside a Soho strip club, where television executives soon came calling.

Under which name did Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson work the London clubs as a double act before The Young Ones?

20th Century Coyote. The name came from the student comedy troupe in which the two first worked together, and the violent slapstick of their club act went straight into the sitcom.

Which producer built The Young Ones around the best new acts from London's Comedy Store?

Paul Jackson. He was a mainstream light-entertainment producer, with The Two Ronnies among his credits, until a night at the Comedy Store in 1980 set him to getting its acts onto television.

When the housemates run out of money in the episode 'Cash', which job does the pacifist hippie Neil take?

Police officer. The Army turns him down for being a pacifist, so the others bundle him into the police station next door, where the officer in charge is a Mussolini lookalike.

Which 1987 sitcom reunited Young Ones stars Mayall, Edmondson and Planer, with scripts by Ben Elton?

Filthy Rich & Catflap. Mayall's talentless television hopeful, his sponging agent and his drunken minder went on smashing the fourth wall, but the series lasted only six episodes.

Which Mayall and Edmondson sitcom ran 1991-95 as the successor to The Young Ones?

Bottom. The pair wrote it themselves, playing two violent, jobless flatmates in Hammersmith, and then took the characters on stage tours and into a feature film.

Which spoof heavy metal band did Adrian Edmondson write and front in two Channel 4 films of the 1980s?

Bad News. The joke outgrew the films: the four actors played real rock festivals in character and reached the charts with a cover of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' produced by Queen's Brian May.

Adrian Edmondson married which comedian, his co-star in Ben Elton's 1985 serial Happy Families?

Jennifer Saunders. She played five parts in the serial: the dying grandmother and all four of the long-lost sisters that her grandson, played by Edmondson, is sent to find.

The Young Ones actor who played Mike later appeared in Doctor Who as General Staal, a member of which alien race?

Sontaran. Staal, known as 'the undefeated', led an invasion of Earth across two episodes in 2008, and the actor came back as another Sontaran commander two years later.

The actor who played The Young Ones' landlord reached the top 20 in 1984 with which single?

'Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? was first released in 1982 and became a number 15 hit only when it was reissued two years later.

Which university did Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson and Ben Elton of The Young Ones all attend?

Manchester. All three studied drama there in the 1970s, and it was there that Mayall and Edmondson formed the double act they later took round the comedy clubs.

In The Young Ones, who dangles from a parachute in Mike's bedroom?

Buddy Holly. He has supposedly hung upside down from the ceiling since baling out of his doomed plane in 1959, living on insects, and he sings Mike a song about it.

Which cosy 1970s sitcom's opening titles does a furious housemate tear through in The Young Ones?

The Good Life. Neil's visiting parents have just said the students' own programme ought to be more like it, and the four go on to try self-sufficiency in the back garden.

Which member of Monty Python turns up in The Young Ones as a drunken vicar at a graveside?

Terry Jones. He appears in 'Nasty', the episode in which the four set up a video recorder to watch a horror film and end up being chased round the house by a vampire.

Which Young Ones regular later called the Footlights guest stars of 'Bambi' 'the enemy' of alternative comedy?

Alexei Sayle. He kept away from the Footlights guests, appearing only in a separate scene as a train driver, and said afterwards that the rest of the cast had been far too charmed by them.

Which guest star plays three different roles across The Young Ones, among them Dr Carlisle and Captain Blood?

Robbie Coltrane. His Dr Carlisle turns out at the end of 'Bambi' to have been watching the whole episode as a bacterial culture under his microscope, and the four are squashed by his giant eclair.

In the second episode of The Young Ones, what do the housemates strike in the cellar of their new home?

Oil. Mike promptly becomes 'El Presidente' and Rick and Neil are put to work as slave labour, until Rick tries to organise a workers' revolution.

The one Young Ones episode without a band featured which kind of performer instead?

A lion tamer. In 'Flood' he is renting Mike's bedroom along with his man-eating lions, which is where the housemates send the landlord once a potion has turned him into an axe-wielding maniac.

When their exam results arrive in the final episode of The Young Ones, how have the four done?

Bottom in the whole world. The postman has already opened the letters and reads them out, with Rick last of all, and the four decide that the only thing left to do is rob a bank.

On which US channel did The Young Ones begin airing, edited for content, on 5 June 1985?

MTV. The channel's own history credits the British import with setting it on a comedy route that later gave a home to Ben Stiller and Jon Stewart.

Which guitarist from the Shadows was the featured guest on the Young Ones cast's Comic Relief single in 1986?

Hank Marvin. He had played lead guitar on the original 1959 recording, and 27 years later the remake's sleeve billed him by name alongside the cast.

What do the four housemates arm themselves with to rob a bank in the final episode of The Young Ones?

Water pistols. Nobody in the bank takes any notice of them, but a real armed robbery is under way at the same time, and Rick walks out with the real robbers' loot by mistake.