Lessons From The Not So Young Ones

Firstly, let me quickly say Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for the support over the last 10 days or so since I started the blog (It feels like a hell of a lot longer). If you do have a spare moment, any comments or general feedback would be genuinely appreciated. The following piece is a bit more straight compared to previous posts, but as you will be able to tell it is a subject which I feel strongly about.

It was six months after The Clash released their final (mentionable) album, post-punk and new romanticism were thriving in the clubs across Britain, the wicked witch of Westminster was just three years into her reign of terror, and riots had already broke out from Brixton to Toxteth.

The BBC was only just beginning to shed its middle class approach to broadcasting, and was now facing competition from more trendy channels such as channel 4. So it was a breath of fresh air for the BBC when The Young Ones first smashed its way onto the TV screens of the British public 30 years ago, in November 1982.

Visually, there was certainly nothing pioneering about the programme; the scenery wobbled, the green screen efforts were frankly crap, and the puppets looked like they had been made by primary school children. Yet were so many ground-breaking aspects to The Young Ones. For a start, allowing a sitcom on the BBC which was highly opinionated, shunned authority and made a mockery of the rich was just absurd.

For me, watching The Young Ones has been a part of my life since childhood, it was the mindless slapstick and general stupidity which drew me to it as a child, but as I got older I started to appreciate the political side, and the fact that the characters were so innovative.

Yes, Rick was a spotty pretentious twat, but the fact that his character was making jibes at Thatcher on BBC during primetime TV, and the fact that the programme provided Alexei Sayle a platform to air his often comical Marxist views in the form of his Eastern European characters really gave the image of the programme sticking its fingers up to middleclass mainstream comedies on the channel (particularly The Good Life). It really was punk ethos, spread through the form of comedy.

It’s hard to think of another sitcom (especially on the BBC) which has provided such an apt commentary on social and political aspects of life, whilst still being incredibly humorous and appealing to such a wide audience.

Watching the classic episodes back now, it is notable just how many similarities there are between times then and now. Granted, we've come a long way in technological advances, we've been provided with phones, laptops, Xboxes, ipods, and hundreds more TV channels, all of which which don't fade to the white dot after 1am, but it's remarkable just how alike today is to 1982. Looking back over the last 12 months or so Britain has once again been plagued by rioting, union strikes, and government cuts, not to mention the fact that the gap between the rich and poor is now at an all-time high.

In these times of austerity, when we’re faced with corrupt government and bankers, when we’re constantly let down by idiotic politicians who make false promises; it’s easy to see why a number of people are tuning back to punk.  

Listening to punk music and watching programmes such as The Young Ones makes you realise how we need to wake up to the fact that we should be standing up and fighting back, because God knows we really need to. I don't think punk has ever been so relevant.