The show focused on the lives of four dissimilar students and their landlord's family on different plots that often included anarchic, offbeat, surreal humour.

The show often included slapstick gags, visual humour and surreal jokes sometimes acted out by puppets, with each episode also featuring a notable selection of guest stars and musical numbers from various performers.

The show became a notable icon of 1980s British popular culture, and it received its own game and a home-media release while becoming the first non-music-related programme to appear on MTV in the United States in 1985.

[4] The new club proved immensely popular amongst London's comedy venues and brought the group to the attention of Jeremy Isaacs, head of the new Channel 4.

In response to this, the BBC opted to recruit the group for their own comedy projects, and they began negotiations with Edmondson, Mayall, Richardson, Planer and Sayle to star in a sitcom that would operate on a similar broadcast arrangement, under the title of The Young Ones, which alludes to and subverts the song of the same name, written by Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett and performed by Cliff Richard and The Shadows, which had become a No.

According to Jackson, the finished project was met with complete disbelief by the BBC, but the recent arrival of Channel 4 led the broadcaster to air what had been created a week after its opening night, on 9 November.

[7] To help make it stand out, the group opted to combine traditional sitcom style with violent slapstick, non-sequitur plot turns, and surrealism.

These older styles were mixed with the working and lower-middle class attitudes of the growing 1980s alternative comedy boom, in which all the principal performers except Ryan had been involved.

The programme focuses on the lives of four undergraduate students who share a house in squalid condition (with the fictitious address of 15 Credibility Street), while attending their studies at the fictional Scumbag College, London.

[10] The Young Ones was more notable for its use of violent slapstick, which Edmondson and Mayall had been using in their double-act routines, the use of surreal elements such as puppets playing the role of talking animals or objects (in a similar manner to The Goodies), use of lengthy cutaways with no relation to the episode's plot,[11] and frequent breaches of the fourth wall for comedic efforts, either to break a punchline to a joke or make a plot point obvious; in several occasions, Sayle used this element to break from his character and address the audience in his real-life Liverpudlian accent.

Rik Mayall once jokingly said that the household was effectively a nuclear family, with Mike as the father, Neil as the mother, Vyvyan as the rebellious son, and Rick (with a pig-tail) as the daughter.

Notable guests on the programme included Ben Elton, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Hale and Pace, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Mark Arden, Stephen Frost, Jools Holland, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones, Anthony Sharp, Terry Jones, Chris Barrie, Helen Lederer, Keith Allen, Paul Merton, Paul Bradley, Pauline Melville, Tamsin Heatley, Ronnie Golden, Roger Sloman, Lee Cornes, Helen Atkinson Wood, Norman Lovett, Lenny Henry, David Rappaport, Robbie Coltrane, Tony Robinson, Andy De La Tour and Emma Thompson.

The accompanying Neil's Heavy Concept Album, a loose collection of songs and spoken comedy, included appearances by The Young Ones alumni Dawn French and Stephen Fry.

The one episode that featured no musical act still fulfilled the variety criteria by including a lion tamer whose presence also directly contributed to the plot.

In the first six episodes of the series, a person whose face is covered by hair appears in the background of some scenes, such as to the left when Neil gets hit by Vyvyan with a kettle in "Bomb".

Writer Ben Elton replied, saying "I have no idea what you are talking about I'm afraid..." By contrast, one of the directors of the series, Geoff Posner, said that he and Paul Jackson "thought it would be fun to have some ghostly figure in the background of some scenes that was never explained or talked about..."[22] During an event at the Bristol Slapstick Festival 2018, Adrian Edmondson was asked about the fifth housemate during an audience question session, and named the person playing the 'fifth housemate' as his university friend Mark Dewison.

In a documentary, How the Young Ones Changed Comedy, that aired in 2018 on Gold, series co-writer Lise Mayer said she believed the housemate had arrived to a party at the student house at some point in the past, and had never left.

[23] Although the series was set in north London, many external scenes were filmed in Bristol, namely the suburb of Bishopston, where the student house is situated at the top of Codrington Road.

The pub in which Vyvyan's mum works, the Kebab and Calculator in the series, was the Cock of the North (since renamed the Westbury Park Tavern) in Northumbria Drive, Bristol.

The shop was renamed "OK Chemists" for the scene, in which Mike goes to buy cough medicine, but orders £180 worth of Durex condoms instead—"Force of habit".

Alexei Sayle was not involved, as he felt collaborating with Richard was against the alternative ethos of the show, but had already achieved chart success in 1984 with "'Ullo John!

It featured Stewart's alums Barbara Gaskin, Jakko Jakszyk, Pip Pyle, Gavin Harrison, Jimmy Hastings and Rick Biddulph.

At the 1986 Comic Relief stage shows, The Young Ones performed "Living Doll" live (following a short skit which involved Rick doing a comic song about showing his underwear and bodily parts, before being ejected from the group by Mike, and Vyvyan supposedly having backstage sex with Kate Bush with Neil as his contraceptive).

DVD releases were initially very basic: Only the US "Every Stoopid Episode" edition featured excerpts from existing documentaries, and no extra footage was included.

Musical references proved difficult to clear so "The Sounds of Silence" (one line) and "Subterranean Homesick Blues" were excised from the US editions.

[29] Robert Llewellyn wrote in his book The Man in the Rubber Mask (1994): The Young Ones was taken over the Atlantic in the mid eighties, and Nigel [Planer] was the only member of the British cast to go.

He had experienced a fairly hideous time, worried sick that he was going to have to stay there for six years with a group of people he hated who managed to make The Young Ones into a sort of grubby Benny Hill Show.

In the same year, Planer and Edmondson revived the characters of Neil and Vyvyan, albeit grown up and wearing standard clothes, in an advert for Friends Provident.

The 2006 SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Chimps Ahoy" featured Mayall, Ryan and Planer as guest stars, playing a trio of chimpanzees who come to inspect the progress Sandy Cheeks has made with her inventions.

The Young Ones characters were licensed from the owners of the BBC TV series, Rik Mayall, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer.