What is The Young Ones?
The Young Ones is a British-made television sitcom made in 1982 and 1984, about four totally mis-matched students sharing a house together in the early 1980s. But like all classic television programmes, it transcended its’ roots to become the classic British comedy series of the early 1980s, helping to launch the then-alternative comedy scene into mainstream TV culture. Like Monty Python in the 1960s and The Goodies in the 1970s, it occasionally went into surreal sketches and characters that retained a vague, at best link to the main narrative. Almost every significant “alternative” British comedian of the late 1980s and 1990s were featured in The Young Ones, either on screen or behind the scenes. People such as Chris Barrie, Robbie Coltrane, Ben Elton, Dawn French, Stephen Fry, Hale & Pace, Lenny Henry, Hugh Laurie, Norman Lovett, Griff Rhys Jones, Tony Robinson, Jennifer Saunders, Mel Smith, and two-time Oscar winner Emma Thompson got their first starts on television through The Youn
