The Young Ones TV Series Trivia
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49 free The Young Ones TV Series trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This The Young Ones TV series trivia quiz covers both series of the anarchic BBC2 sitcom that put alternative comedy on television in 1982. It starts with the household — Vyvyan and his hamster, Rick the Cliff Richard fan, Neil the Peace Studies hippie, Mike the Cool Person and Alexei Sayle's Balowski clan — and their address at 15 Credibility Street, Scumbag College. Then it gets into how the show was made: why a band played in almost every episode, the University Challenge parody 'Bambi' with Fry, Laurie and Thompson as Footlights College, the Bristol filming locations, the Kebab and Calculator, the fifth housemate, the flash frames, the number-one 'Living Doll' for Comic Relief and Neil's 'Hole in My Shoe', plus what Mayall, Edmondson, Planer, Ryan and Sayle went on to do. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who watched it; the rest are for people who can quote the University Challenge scores. Our Red Dwarf and Madness pages are natural next stops. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on the show and its cast and the interviews they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which third writer, then Mayall's girlfriend, co-wrote The Young Ones with him and Ben Elton?
Lise Mayer
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.
Q 02Which channel first showed The Young Ones in 1982, a week after its new rival Channel 4 went on air?
BBC2
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.
Q 03The Young Ones' twelve-episode run matched which 1970s BBC sitcom?
Fawlty Towers
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.
Q 04Which character, played by Adrian Edmondson, was the violent punk medical student?
Vyvyan
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.
Q 05In The Young Ones, what was the name of the punk housemate's talking Glaswegian hamster?
Special Patrol Group
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.
Q 06Rik Mayall's character Rick was a self-proclaimed anarchist and devoted fan of which singer?
Cliff Richard
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.
Q 07Which food does the hippie housemate Neil cook so often in The Young Ones that it became his trademark?
Lentils
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.
Q 08Which Young Ones star came from outside the comedy-club circuit, as a late replacement for Peter Richardson?
Christopher Ryan
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.
Q 09At which fictional institution are the four students of The Young Ones supposedly enrolled?
Scumbag College
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.
Q 10What kind of car does the punk housemate drive in The Young Ones, painted yellow with flames up the sides?
Ford Anglia
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.
Q 11What is the name of the students' landlord in The Young Ones?
Jerzei Balowski
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.
Q 12Why did most Young Ones episodes include a live band?
To qualify as variety and get a bigger budget
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.
Q 13Which band appeared in two episodes of The Young Ones?
Madness
Q 21Nigel Planer, in character as Neil, reached number 2 in 1984 with a cover of which Traffic song?
Hole in My Shoe
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.
Q 22Which 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
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.
Q 23Most of The Young Ones' exterior scenes were filmed in which English city, despite the north London setting?
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.
Q 14Which band plays in the living room in The Young Ones episode 'Bambi'?
Motörhead
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.
Q 15The Young Ones episode 'Bambi' sends up which student quiz show?
University Challenge
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.
Q 16Which future Oscar winner played Miss Money-Sterling, of the Footlights College team, in The Young Ones?
Emma Thompson
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.
Q 17In The Young Ones, which comedian played the quiz host 'Bambi', a spoof of Bamber Gascoigne?
Griff Rhys Jones
Griff Rhys Jones. His Bambi refuses to let the students win, then openly favours the other team, accepting wrong answers and a £50 bribe.
Q 18How does the final episode of The Young Ones end for the four?
Their bus goes over a cliff
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.
Q 19Which 1959 hit did the Young Ones cast re-record with its original singer for Comic Relief in 1986?
Living Doll
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.
Q 20Which veteran Radio 1 disc jockey appears in The Young Ones as God?
Alan Freeman
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.
Bristol
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.
Q 24In The Young Ones, what is the name of the pub where the punk housemate's mum works?
The Kebab and Calculator
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.
Q 25How does the very first episode of The Young Ones end?
A plane crashes into the house
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.
Q 26The Young Ones' second series hid 'subliminal' single frames in its episodes, including the end credits of which film?
Carry On Cowboy
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.
Q 27What grand title does Rick give himself in The Young Ones when he pictures the nation mourning his death?
The People's Poet
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.
Q 28Which London club, set up by future Young Ones stars with French and Saunders, caught Channel 4's attention?
The Comic Strip
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.
Q 29Under which name did Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson work the London clubs as a double act before The Young Ones?
20th Century Coyote
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.
Q 30Which producer built The Young Ones around the best new acts from London's Comedy Store?
Paul Jackson
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.