Episode 7: Post-Punk Comedy, The Young Ones

 

Comedians like Rik Mayal, Alexie Sayle, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders were an integral part of alternative culture in the 1980s.  And In many ways, these figures were as innovative and iconoclastic as their cousins in the post-punk music scene. While groups like The Goons and Monty Python testify to a satirical and surreal strain in British comedy that preceded the alternative comedy scene of the 1980s, most television comedy in Old Blighty was dire. For the most part, comedy on the tube trafficked in broad stereotypes: shrill harpies, dumb bimbos, and hapless migrants from the subcontinent and the Caribbean: Love Thy Neighbour, Mind Your Language, Are You Being Served and so on. In short, mainstream comedy from the 1970s was pretty low brow. It performed the cultural work of normalising sexist and racist prejudices that were prevalent during the 1960s and 70s. The Alternative comics of the 1980s consciously defined themselves against these immediate precursors.  In this episode we re-visit The Young Ones, arguably the most exemplary televisual manifestation of the anarchic ethos of the alt 80s zeitgeist. So, let’s all go on a summer holiday to Thatcher’s Britain with Rik, Vyvyan, Neil and Mike, the chaotic, dishevelled, unruly, slothful Young Ones.