The Young Ones: Extra Stoopid Edition

25 years later on, it's still hard to imagine something like The Young Ones ever making its way onto the airwaves in the States, let alone becoming an influential and groundbreaking smash sensation as it was in England. You can see bits of its wit emerge in American television's low-brow history; the dark cynicism of Get A Life, the rudeness of the unsympathetic Bundys in Married...With Children, the lengthy non-sequiturs of Family Guy and the stoned surrealism of Adult Swim. Yet, even with our love of sanitized adaptations, the U.S thankfully has made no attempt at an import. Like the 29th minute of a Ramones album, it's hard to imagine sitting through a 13th episode of The Young Ones, but the first 12 are utterly brilliant.

Chock the lack of translation up to a British comprehension of the compendium of youth culture's rebellious streak in Thatcherite U.K., where punk rock meant spitting and snarling at the Queen's Jubilee for throwing a party in the midst of a severe economic depression, not a rich rock star like Cyndi Lauper pawning pauper's clothes at the nearby Salvation Army to make love tropes in pink hair get-ups like we got over here in the states. While America swallowed down soap opera tripe like Dallas (which The Young Ones hardily parodied) and turned to advertisements for record labels as their primary source of nonconformity (MTV, which the Young Ones had a brief syndicated run on), the fringes of the British alternative comedy club scene, the folks who just nights ago were performing in strip clubs, became celebrities and barely even needed to soften their acts to do so.

The Young Ones was comedy turned all the way up to eleven, its four nasty protagonists screaming quick-witted insults at each other louder than used car salesmen for the whole of each episode. Essentially stereotypes of easily maligned and easily recognizable figures from the University caste, the four roommates and attendees of Scumbag College transcended the routine "kids these days" shtick by supplanting their loving critique of the young with a subversive stab at the awful old world. For all their rotten antics, horrible manners and bad behavior, the caricatures on The Young Ones were anti-heroes, the terrifying, yet liberating visage of absolute freedom.

There was Vyvyan, the resident punk whose solution to everything was to either smash it or blow it up. Proud owner of a house hamster named Special Patrol Group; Vyvyan also once drove around with an amputated leg on the front of his car and mistook his own flatulence for pregnancy. Rick, whose name was often preceded with a P when his roommates referred to him, was a didactic Anarchist-cum-Marxist who reverted to the bigoted and conservative ways of his parents whenever threatened. Spaced-out hippie Neil selflessly did all of the housework, but was treated only with acrimony or indifference the many times he made a suicide attempt. If there were a leader of the pack, it would be the self-appointed swinger and possible virgin Mike whose entrepreneurial spirit both coasted the gang out of some tough spots and helped him blackmail his way through University.

Much of the show's humor comes from the utter squalor the boys resided in. The first series starts off with the group fighting to keep their condemned house from being torn down. It's not hard to see why the public health authorities might have come to their decision, what with the group regularly eating from the garbage, bathing in brown bath water, burning their clothes and furniture to stay warm and punching holes into the adjacent flats. It's often so gross in the various homes the boys live in that you feel filthy watching it. To American plasticine supermodel-o-vision though, Rick's acne alone feels like Guy Fawkes spraying the halls of the E! Network with gunpowder.

In addition to the core four, comedian Alexei Sayle regularly made an appearance to do a bizarre stream of consciousness in character as a landlord, a train conductor, a South African vampire or British Police Chief Benito Mussolini respectively.

If all of this doesn't sound interesting enough, imagine a documentary about being a fly on the wall, a series of subliminal flash cuts splicing random imagery into each episode unprovoked, several appearances by the elephant man and the murder of a sock trying to escape a trip to the launderette. While all this lunacy paints the scenery a deep shade of Jackson Pollack crazy, it's the anarchic Marx Brothers rapport between the characters that keeps you hooked through each stoopid episode.

The Extra Stoopid Edition DVD restores several parts of the original series that were not available for licensing purposes on the Every Stoopid Episode box set released several years back (such as a sequence with incidental Beatles music and a performance of Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues by members of Squeeze and the Police). The main draw are the episodes themselves of course, but there's been a curious omission of some the Every Stoopid Episode edition's bonuses material, which included episodes of the two series Filthy Rich Claptrap and Bottom, both starring Young Ones alums.

In addition to the recut material, there are three new documentaries on the making of The Young Ones, the show's guest stars (which included Terry Jones, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, among others) and the alternative comedy scene in Britain. Two episodes also contain feature commentaries. Interesting stuff for the uninformed, but for completists who already own the first box set it hardly seems like new information.

The Young Ones followed the Fawlty Towers model of resigning itself to a short run before the potential to jump the shark arose. Hence, the twelve episodes here are all series peaks worth repeat viewings (especially "Bomb" and "Bambi"). The musical performances, which include the likes of Madness, Motorhead, The Damned and Dexy's Midnight Runners, are time-stamped, but not necessarily in a bad way. It was, after all, an exciting time for music.

As the theme song stated, they may not have been The Young Ones very long, but with any luck the show will continue its underground legacy for years to come.