Rampaging revolutionaries
The Young Ones had its roots in the alternative comedy revolution that happened in the late 70s. The comedy clubs in London were suddenly being flooded with brash new talent that had no time for the mother-in-law jokes and mild-mannered humour favoured by the previous, Jimmy Tarbuck generation.

Ground zero of the new wave was The Comedy Store, a club which opened in 1979. It was here that Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton first came to notice as motor-mouthed comperes. It was also here that Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson worked as a shrieking, violent double-act, while Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson also formed a duo of dubious taste.

Telly bomb
The two double-acts (Rik and Ade, Planer and Richardson) eventually broke away from the Comedy Store and started working as "the Comedy Strip" at a nearby Soho nightspot. It was here that they were talent-spotted by the BBC.

Producer Paul Jackson loved this new, anarchic kind of comedy, and persuaded his bosses to create a cabaret-style TV special called Boom Boom... Out Go The Lights. Broadcast on BBC 2 in 1980, it introduced the comedians to TV for the first time. Unfortunately, it was also a total flop.

As Jackson later recalled, it had the "worst audience response in the history of the comedy department."

The Young Ones
Boom Boom may have vanished into the abyss, but producer Paul Jackson knew the Comedy Store / Comic Strip brand of comedy was the way of the future. Thanks to his influence, the BBC gave the gang another chance - this time with a sitcom.

Rik Mayall and his then-girlfriend Lise Mayer came up with the idea of a student house filled with their old Comedy Store characters - a radical and terrible anarchist, a self-abusing punk, a miserable hippy. The eventual scripts were written by Mayall and Mayer, together with their university chum Ben Elton.

Peter Richardson was supposed to play the one "normal" student in the house, but dropped out due to a long-standing tiff with producer Paul Jackson (this was rooted in the fact that Jackson had left Richardson out of the Boom Boom show two years before).

A friend of Rik's drew his attention to Christopher Ryan, a straight actor appearing in a stage play at the time, and Ryan was duly recruited as the final Young One.

It's not a sitcom, honest
One of the oddest things about The Young Ones is the fact that a guest band plays in almost every episode - often just breaking into the story with no explanation. This was done for budget reasons: at the time the BBC had no money to put into sitcoms, but there was cash for light entertainment. Having musical interludes meant the Young Ones could be classified as light entertainment, and get plenty of funding.

Bands such as Madness, Dexys Midnight Runners and Motorhead turned up. Only one episode lacked a band, so to make it "light entertainment" they brought in a lion tamer for a scene!

Star-studded silliness
Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson all appeared in what is possibly the most famous episode, "Bambi". But there are plenty of other famous faces to look out for. Future Red Dwarf star Chris Barrie appears as a ship captain, Robbie Coltrane plays a doorman and a pirate, Dawn French pops up as the devil and the Easter Bunny, Hale and Pace cameo as a pair of gravediggers, Lenny Henry has a walk-on as a postman, and there's also a very young Paul Merton as a country yokel in the episode "Time".

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