The People's Poet

The time: around my thirteenth birthday. The place: a family get-together. With all of my folks outside enjoying the warm summer evening with many a pint, me and a couple of older cousins were left in custody of the telly. I can't remember much of what they were showing that night; like 99% of TV output in any given era, it was pointless pap, filling the schedules with fare designed to be as inoffensive and unchallenging as possible. But of course, there's one programme I do remember from that night; one that I'd never seen before. One in which the characters spent a full half-hour shouting, swearing, insulting everyone, and whacking each other with various pieces of the set. One which took the real world, spun it round, turned it upside down and spat it back out the screen at us. One written by, and starring - amongst many other talented folks - the great Rik Mayall.

Of course, I'd known about Rik Mayall for a good few years even then, but it wasn't until I saw The Young Ones for the first time that I began to understand what an intuitive and layered understanding of humour he had. That evening, my almost-teenage self was reduced to a sniggering wreck by the sight of people being thrown through walls and having pickaxes buried in their heads, whilst periodically stopping to engage in dialogue which Oscar Wilde would no doubt have envied ("you just called me a BASTARD, didn't you, Neil?"). But beyond that physical humour and elementary badinage lay a rich core of satire which set a small and weak lightbulb flickering inside my young brain. When the housemates struck oil in the cellar and Mike declared the house a fascist state with himself as ruler, Vyv as his police enforcer, and Rick and Neil as an oppressed workforce, I didn't fully "get" the parallels with Third World regimes of the time (not to mention the Thatcher government's attitude to North Sea oil). When Rick decided to instigate a revolution on Neil's behalf which he expected Neil to pay for, I didn't quite "get" the swipe at many ill-conceived revolutionary movements throughout modern history. I didn't get them, but I knew there was something there just beyond my grasp, like reaching for a shiny coin at the bottom of a pool. It's a rare comedy which makes you want to be a grown-up so you can understand its intelligence, but years later, makes you want to be a kid again so you can laugh at its slapstick with the unbridled joy of adolescence. The Young Ones managed just that.

There have been plenty of TV comedies since which marry the juvenile with the cerebral, and use a self-contained world with its own rules and conventions as a vehicle for satire: Father Ted, The Simpsons and South Park are three of my favourites. None of them would exist if not for The Young Ones. Of course, I know that Rik Mayall accomplished far, far more with his career, and created dozens of hilarious characters from Lord Flashheart to Alan B'Stard, but nevertheless, when I heard about his sudden death, my mind immediately went back to that summer night when I first saw the ludicrous, obnoxious and hilarious antics of The People's Poet. Since then, I've never stopped learning, and I've never stopped laughing.

"Thank you, People's Poet. You're my hero."