the young ones

Some days, I like to lead you all carefully into another tale of a sitcom production oddity. Other days, I like to throw a load of recording dates at you, and leave you to fend for yourself.

Guess which one this is. Let’s take a look at when Series 2 of The Young Ones was actually made.

Two of those dates are not like the others. What was a fairly standard weekly production schedule for the first four episodes, suddenly has a gap of two months, before the last two episodes “Time” and “Summer Holiday” were recorded. What gives?

Those of you familiar with the BBC strikes around this time will already have guessed the problem. Luckily, we have a contemporary report from The Times by David Hewson, which explicitly states what happened, and that it specifically affected The Young Ones:

“The BBC faces a great log jam of unfinished drama and light entertainment programmes as the strike by 700 sceneshifters enters its fourth week.

Its effects on broadcasts are minimal, but the strike could lead to a severe shortage of home-produced plays and shows if it continues.

Postponed programmes include the latest Shakespeare production Titus Andronicus, three plays of the month, a new series of The Young Ones, the Kenny Everett Television Show, and a Ronnie Corbett comedy Sorry.

The director of resources for BBC Television, Mr Michael Checkland, has written to all television staff giving a warning that the corporation will not contemplate a return to work under the old working arrangements demanded by the strikers.”

— The Times, “BBC drama delayed by scenery strike”, March 13th 1984

This particular strike is well-known by Top of the Pops aficionados, as it affected the on-screen look of the show, with a vastly reduced set. The strike’s effects on The Young Ones are far less known about – in fact, it’s not widely-known that the strike had any impact on the show at all. And why should it be? This isn’t a Top of the Pops situation – the show ended up being produced unscathed.

Well, more or less unscathed, anyway. Let’s prod a bit deeper.

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best of, the young ones

Old TV shows gather anecdotes over the years. They gather anecdotes until it’s sometimes difficult to see the real story through the detritus. It’s not really anybody’s fault. It just happens.

A case in point. Why were there bands in The Young Ones? If you’ve read much about the show or watched any documentaries, you already know the answer. Take the second episode of A History of Alternative Comedy (TX: 17/1/99):

PAUL JACKSON: It had kinds of quirky elements in it already in that first script, but I said if we could just put a band in or something, because then we’ll be a variety show, and we’ll get slightly more money. So we put Nine Below Zero in, playing in the boys room.

Nearly two decades later, in Gold’s How The Young Ones Changed Comedy (TX: 26/05/18), this story is still being repeated:

ADRIAN EDMONDSON: It got funding from the variety arm of the BBC budget, which meant it had to have a band in each week. So it wasn’t us putting a band in: it had to have a band in.

The best and most comprehensive version of the tale is also told by Paul Jackson, in this BFI panel from 2018. (To his credit, he labels it as an old story by now.)

PAUL JACKSON: By having a band in, we came under the Variety department, and the Variety shows – Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise and so on – used to get two days in the studio, and more money. We never knew how much money, because the BBC didn’t tell you at the time, but bigger budgets, two days in the studio. A standard sitcom had one day in the studio… so we had a much bigger canvas.

Certainly, it is true that The Young Ones was made by the Variety department, rather than Comedy. Let’s take an obvious example: the day that BBC2 first broadcast “Oil” (TX: 16/11/82), the Terry and June episode “Playing Pool” was premiering over on BBC1. Let’s take a quick look at the programme numbers:

LLV indicates a programme was made as part of the Variety department at the Beeb, and LLC indicates that it was made by Comedy. As we can see, The Young Ones gets an LLV code, and Terry and June gets an LLC. Moreover, it’s clearly stated that The Young Ones got two days in the studio, while Terry and June only got one. Everything matches up nicely.

Well sort of, anyway. Let me throw a couple more programme numbers into the mix. Firstly for Filthy, Rich & Catflap, and secondly for Bottom.

Both of these were made under the auspices of Variety, with an LLV code, and with two days in the studio. And yet you never hear, for instance, people talking about bands being forced into episodes of Bottom. Because it didn’t happen.

Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that the anecdote about why bands are in The Young Ones is false. Nor am I saying that Bottom et al being made under the auspices of Variety without there being bands in the show is inexplicable. Far from it, in fact. I can imagine a situation where unproven talent needs to be beholden to certain rules that proven talent does not. I can also think of ten other possible reasons.

I’m merely arguing that the way this anecdote is usually told gives an incomplete picture. Which is absolutely fine for a while… but when the same story keeps being told over and over again, it deserves a bit of a poke with a large stick every so often.

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best of, the young ones

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.

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best of, the young ones

Today, we’re going to answer a huge burning question about The Young Ones. No, nothing to do with flash frames, or hidden fifth housemates. This is the really important stuff.

Exactly what is the farty neighbour watching on her television in “Cash”, just before she switches over to Andy De La Tour doing a public information film?

Squinting at it, it seems impossible to tell. Some kind of drawing of a car? Unless it’s some well-known cartoon, or mentioned in the paperwork for rights reasons, or specified in the script, how could we ever figure it out?

Spoiler: it’s not a well-known cartoon, or mentioned on the paperwork for rights reasons, or specified in the script. We have only our wits to go on here.

Well… wits, and a certain video of Young Ones raw studio footage, sitting patiently on YouTube. I wrote recently about the section of this video containing material for the episode “Nasty”, but the second half of the video is entirely dedicated to “Cash”. And crucially, it includes the entire recording session for this scene.

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best of, the young ones

It’s the 6th February 1984 in studio TC4, and Rik Mayall is having a circular saw aimed at his knackers.

I write a lot about comedy on here. Sometimes I write some very silly things about comedy indeed. Take, for instance, this analysis of one of the main sets in Blackadder Goes Forth, and how it showed up in various forms throughout the series. You have to have a certain kind of mind to find that interesting, and admittedly, part of it is a pure puzzle box mentality: “What bit goes where?”

But there is also something a little deeper going on there. For all the careful explanations of what writers were hoping to achieve with their work – which for the avoidance of doubt, is something I’m also extremely interested in – what I really want to be able to do is transport myself back, and be present in the room where the comedy was actually made. I get obsessed with wanting to know how a room felt, either in the writing, or in the shooting. Trying to figure out what piece of wood went where while recording a sitcom is an attempt at nothing less than time travel, however ludicrous that sounds.

Which is where your good old fashioned studio recording tapes come in. Whether it’s just clips in documentaries, longer extracts released as DVD extras, or bootlegs passed quietly around as though we’re all crack dealers, there’s nothing quite seeing the raw footage of how a show is made to get a sense of how things felt. An incomplete sense, of course. Nothing can quite replace a real time machine. But it’s something.

All of which preamble is leading up to this glorious video on YouTube. Two hours of raw studio recordings of The Young Ones, precisely none of which is officially sanctioned for release, and precisely all of which is fascinating.

Let’s be very clear about what the above footage represents. Each episode of The Young Ones – unusually for a sitcom of the era – had two days in the studio. These consisted of a pre-record day for the complicated technical bits, without an audience, followed by an audience record the very next day. The above footage is the bulk of the pre-record days for the episodes “Nasty” and “Cash”. The fact that these are the pre-record days explains the lack of audience laughter on the footage, something a few people in the YouTube comments are a little confused by. An edited version of this material would have been shown to the audience the next day on the studio monitors, along with recording the rest of the show in front of them, in order to get the laughs.

Not that what we are seeing is the edited footage that the audience would have seen, either. This is the complete – or near-complete – recording of the day, featuring multiple takes of the material. In short: this really is as close as we can get to skulking around in the studio for the day, silently watching as the team shoot one of the best sitcoms ever made. We even know exactly when everything occurs; the timecode at the bottom of the screen is literally the time of the recording.

There is no substitute for simply watching the video embedded above. But I thought it might be useful to write some notes to go alongside it. Here then, are some observations on the first half of the video, covering the pre-record day for “Nasty”. In particular, I’ve tried to identify any part of the script which don’t make it into the final edit, along with which of the multiple takes were actually used in the finished show.

Enjoy.

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best of, the young ones