FAQ

The Young Ones is a groundbreaking British sitcom that ran from 1982 - 1984 and was created by Rik Mayall, Lise Mayer and Ben Elton with additional material by Alexei Sayle. The Young Ones is a weird sitcom that centers around four dysfunctional and mismatched university students whom have nothing in common whom share a flat in North London. The members of The Young Ones are Vivian, a psychotic and moronic punk. Rick, an pompous and arrogant politically minded poet and Cliff Richards fan. Neil, a clinically depressed hippie and Mike, a unfunny and bossy cool guy. The Young Ones would get frequently visited by their eccentric landlord Jerzei Balowski and his family. The sitcom not only follows The Young Ones and their antics and misadventures, other characters would interact and break the fourth wall with the viewers and there would be live performances by bands and solo artists.

Vyvyan used to be a masculine name but then people started naming girls "Vivienne" and it eventually became viewed as a girl's name in either form. A lot of women's names used to be men's: Alison, Ashley, Beverly, Gale, Hillary, Lauren, Lindsay, Meredith, etc. So maybe his mum was just old fashioned or it was a family name.

One joke in the third Omen film refers to the BBC as "the British Broadcasting Charity". That is very apt. It was only after the advent of digital television and the changes brought by streaming becoming mainstream that the BBC stopped cutting massive corners with their productions.

Protocol during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was to shoot shows with video of varying kinds (reel to reel being the only possibility prior to the advent of Betamax) for indoor and on-set shots, and sixteen millimetre film for outdoor location shots. The BBC is also notoriously bad at preserving their old productions. It is highly unlikely that the original video of indoor shots of The Young Ones even existed after the series concluded. Duplicating video is like making a photocopy in that the quality of copies get worse with every copy of a copy, and typical source materials found in the BBC archives at the advent of DVD-Video were copies of copies at minimum.

Lest we forget, DVD, Betamax, and reel to reel video also have substantially less resolution than is available with present-day televisions. Combined with the BBC's lack of care for their source materials, it is a wonder that the video and audio of The Young Ones looks and sounds as good as they do.

Because this would allow the producers to have the series classified as a "variety" program. This in turn resulted in the BBC giving the producers a greater per-episode budget.

Vyvyan is studying medicine.

Rick is studying sociology or domestic sciences (it varies), and is the only one who ever seems to do any work.

Neil is doing Peace Studies, which is actually a real course in many colleges: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_conflict_studies.

Mike is blackmailing his tutor and the Dean for grants and passing grades for a business degree.

The Special Patrol Group (SPG) was a unit of Greater Londons Metropolitan Police Service, responsible for providing a centrally-based mobile capability for combating serious public disorder and crime that could not be dealt with by local divisions.

The SPG was active from 1965 to 12th January 1987, being replaced by the Territorial Support Group.

This featured on Only Connect. It was Kendal Mintcake (Ben Elton), Miss Money-Sterling (Emma Thompson), Lord Snot (Stephen Fry), and Lord Monty (Hugh Laurie). Ben Elton is the only one who didn't audition for Footlights.