“I Didn’t Know You Were Allowed to Say Wanker on Television!”

Recently, I wrote this ridiculous article about The Young Ones episode “Cash”. So while we’re on the subject, here is something else about the episode which has bugged me for years.

To recap: in order to earn some bread, the gang decide to send Neil to the Army Careers Information Office. In no short order, he is flung right back out onto the pavement.

NEIL: I only said I was a pacifist.

And as the gang help Neil to his feet again, there is a very peculiar edit. The following are two consecutive frames from this moment in the episode:

Everyone has changed position; most obviously Planer, who suddenly has his hands in his pockets. Clearly, something was cut at this point. But what?

Unlike our previous investigation, the raw footage is of no help to us here; no location material is present on that tape. Nor does the paperwork I personally have access to shed any light. But the answer is out there, if you look hard enough.

And I honestly think the cut moment could have gone down in history as one of those TV moments a whole generation remembers.

*   *   *

So, let’s first take a look at How The Young Ones Changed Comedy, a documentary aired by Gold back in May 2018. With these things you kinda have to take the good with the bad. The good: loads of outtakes, most of which had never been shown on broadcast television before. The bad: Mark Lawson.

And one of those outtakes is extremely relevant to the question of our dodgy edit. It’s clearly taken from the same scene as above, outside the Army Careers Information Office:

And the dialogue is the rather amusing:

RICK: I said: you complete wanker.
NEIL: That’s what I thought you said. I didn’t know you were allowed to say wanker on television!

What to make of this? We are given precisely zero context to the clip; the rest of the montage is mainly bloopers featuring Adrian Edmondson fucking up. This is clearly a different thing entirely: actual cut dialogue from the show. If we begin to piece together the details in our heads, we can suspect that this cut section is related to the dodgy edit in the broadcast version of the episode. But we have no proof; while it’s from the same scene, the material above doesn’t directly lead on from the peculiar edit in the final show. If only we had access to more of this cut material.

Here’s the thing: we have access to more of this cut material.

*   *   *

It’s odd, the things which make it out there into the wide world, and those which don’t. For years, I thought I was special in having access to raw studio footage from The Innes Book of Records. Turns out it’s all sitting on the Internet Archive, bold as brass.

But one thing never seemed to make it out there publicly. For decades, there was rumours of a half hour Young Ones outtake tape. Not the raw studio footage for “Cash” and “Nasty”, which was hanging around in private collections for a while, and eventually did make it onto YouTube. (Although the two videos were often confused.) No, this was a tape which, legend had it, was played in to Bottom studio audiences as a warm-up, but never leaked out to the likes of me. A fair few people said they had it, but actual evidence seemed to be thin on the ground.

It eventually got to the point where it almost seemed like it was a myth, and never actually existed. And even though I’ve written a number of ridiculous articles about The Young Ones over the past year, I had entirely forgotten about it.

But it did show up, eventually. In 2014, somebody uploaded it to YouTube, and then at some point quietly removed it. Somehow, I completely missed it at the time. Titled on-screen as “Just For Fun”, the video has a proper opening and closing credits, and could pretty much be broadcast as a programme in its own right. Featuring only footage from Series 2, it very much looks like something created for that series’ wrap party, and indeed that is how my copy is labelled.

As to exactly what it contains: it’s a compilation of bloopers, alternate takes, deleted lines, and most of the violent bits of the show.¹ But crucially for our purposes, it also contains the full version of the cut scene above, which does indeed contain additional footage and lines which weren’t present in the Gold documentary.

So, the full version of the deleted section of this scene goes as follows:

RICK: You complete wanker, Neil.
NEIL: What?
RICK: I said: you complete wanker.
NEIL: That’s what I thought you said. I didn’t know you were allowed to say wanker on television!

For a start, the extra lines make the joke far funnier; you’re only getting half the gag in the documentary version, and starting with “I said” meant it was obviously and annoyingly incomplete. But the useful bit for us is that the footage starts with Neil being dragged up from his feet, showing that this dialogue comes exactly at the point of the weird cut in the broadcast version of “Cash”. So this definitively proves that this is the material which was edited out of the final show at this point, and causes the dodgy edit.

Now, for various reasons, I’m not able to upload the full video of “Just For Fun” here, which I know some of you will find absurdly annoying. For that, I apologise. But I can upload a short clip of the above scene, in its complete form, rather than the truncated version used in the Gold documentary.

So I now present: Rik Mayall and Nigel Planer being extremely amusing.

When watching the thing in full, one immediate thought occurs. Surely the dodgy edit in the broadcast version of the episode indicates that they really were trying to get this material into the show. If they thought it was likely this section was going to be cut, they probably would have been more careful when shooting it to make sure it could be cut cleanly. They really wanted the wanker joke to be transmitted, and thought they had a chance to get it past the Beeb.

And I really do believe that if this had made it to air, it would have firmly lodged into the minds of a whole generation of kids. Can’t you just hear the playgrounds of Britain echoing with the words “You complete wanker, Neil”? Because I sure as hell can. It would have been glorious.

Clearly, though, you actually weren’t allowed to say wanker on television. They took a punt, and they lost.

*   *   *

All of which seems more than enough excitement for one article. But brilliantly, there’s even more to this little tale. Becuase the above wasn’t the only thing cut from this scene. Things got worse. Much, much worse.

With thanks to Dan Sumption, here is a page of the rehearsal script for this part of the episode. It contains the above wanker joke, with slightly different wording, and then follows it up with… well, just read it:

Right, let’s just sit back in awe for a moment.²

A couple of things spring to mind. Firstly the funniest bit of it isn’t the line itself – although I highly enjoy that Vyv specifically states “up the arse”. No, the funniest bit is Neil’s calm “Oh yes, that’s right.” Secondly: surely they knew there wasn’t a chance in hell of this line ever making it into the show. Did they write it purely to amuse themselves?

Possibly. Or maybe it was that old trope of the censor decoy. Put something in which was obviously going to get cut, so they’ll leave in the bit you really wanted to keep. It’s so extreme, it almost reads as a parody of this trope, which is quite Young Ones in itself.³ But to me, it’s yet another indication that they really were genuinely trying to get the “wanker” line to air intact. LATE BLEEP or not.

Every time you scratch at The Young Ones, the show just gets more interesting, doesn’t it?

With many thanks to Jonny Haw for the piecing the bits together about this before I did. Thanks also to Darrell Maclaine-Jones, and Mike Scott for general Young Ones chat, from who I just liberally nick opinions and pretend I came up with them myself.

UPDATE (26/01/21): This article originally said that the “Just For Fun” YouTube upload happened in 2018. Huge thanks to @AmbientSheep, who pointed me towards a forum thread which proves this first happened in 2014. Figuring out the history of this stuff is always difficult when you never saw it happen in the first place. The relevant section above has been corrected.

I also originally made a snide remark in a footnote that it must have been “coincidence” that the outtakes tape appeared at the same time as the Gold documentary. As the forum thread also proves exactly where the documentary team got the footage from, I’ve now updated the footnote to clarify this.

1. All the bloopers from the Gold documentary are clearly taken from it, and the aforementioned forum thread explains exactly how they got hold of it. ↩

2. If you’re wondering about the provenance of this script, then Dan explains all here; his uncle used to run a props company, and was asked to make a lump of cannabis for the episode, presumably for Warlock’s party. I highly suggest you read his website, Our Life With Props, which gives loads of excellent prop-related anecdotes. ↩

3. Incidentally, I highly doubt the dog-fucking lines were ever shot. ↩

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