Television series

The Young Ones

Name: The Young Ones
Genre: Comedy
Released: 1982
Cast: Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Christopher Ryan, Alexei Sayle

Four spectacularly unemployable students share a filthy house and share nothing else — not friendship, not sanity, not the rent. It's less sitcom than fever dream: puppet landlords, live band cameos, walls that erupt into slapstick violence, jokes that outrun the plot entirely. Ferociously silly, deliberately ugly, and gleefully anti-everything, it's for anyone who wants comedy with its brakes cut rather than its laugh track intact.

TVMaze rating

8.0

If you liked this

Bottom1991

Mayall and Edmondson stripped away the punk politics and doubled the violence — this is two grown men destroying a flat and each other with genuine physical commitment. If you loved their chemistry here, this is purer, meaner, funnier chaos.

But No plot, no subtext, just escalating pain — some will find it thrillingly stupid, others just thin.

Blackadder1983

Same BBC era, same appetite for demolishing British institutions, but swapping squalid council flats for royal courts — proof the alternative comedy generation could do wit as sharp as its anarchy.

But Far more scripted and controlled — if you loved the chaos, this might feel too polished.

Monty Python's Flying Circus1969

The blueprint for breaking format itself — sketches that refuse punchlines, characters who acknowledge the camera, silliness treated with total seriousness. Everything anarchic about British comedy since owes it a debt.

But It's sketch format rather than character-driven story, and a few bits have aged into museum pieces.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Goodies1970

The Young Ones borrowed its love of literal, cartoonish violence and anti-authority absurdity directly from this earlier BBC show — same network, same commitment to full stupidity, minus the studs and safety pins.

Before punk gave anarchic British comedy its snarl, three men on a trandem were already blowing up London with giant kittens and absurdist plots. It's the missing link between Python's surrealism and The Young Ones' violence.

But Deliberately childish and dated in places — its cardboard-and-string charm can feel very far from punk.

Absolutely Fabulous1992

Jennifer Saunders came out of the same alternative comedy scene and applied the same gleeful excess to two ageing hedonists instead of four students — champagne and cocaine instead of squalor and violence.

But The targets are fashion and celebrity rather than politics — a softer, glossier kind of anarchy.

The Mighty Boosh2004

Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt inherited the same commitment to full surreal absurdity, just draped in glam-rock costumes instead of punk squalor — a flatshare-adjacent comedy about two men who despise their circumstances.

But Whimsical rather than aggressive — the anger that powers The Young Ones is mostly absent here.

Withnail & I1987

Same era, same degenerate flatmates, same crumbling London squalor — but played as tragicomedy rather than cartoon. It's the version of this milieu where the jokes actually hurt a little on the way out.

But It's melancholic where The Young Ones is manic — a hangover film, not a party one.

Spaced1999no page yet

Twenty years later, Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes take the flatshare-of-losers premise and filter it through pop culture obsession and genre pastiche — gentler, but still gleefully committed to its own nonsense.

But Warmer and more sincere underneath the jokes — the nihilism here has been replaced by affection.

The Inbetweeners2008

Cruder cousins of the same degenerate-youth comedy, swapping students for sixth-formers and punk nihilism for pure embarrassment. If gross-out humiliation and hopeless male friendship groups are your thing, this delivers relentlessly.

But It's far less surreal or political than The Young Ones — grounded purely in teenage humiliation.

Beavis and Butt-Head1992

Both shows find comedy in characters too stupid and self-destructive to function, but Beavis and Butt-Head strips away the politics and punk aesthetic entirely, proving the same joke works animated, American, and utterly brainless.

Two American teenage idiots destroy everything they touch while providing zero insight and endless laughs — the same engine of gleeful stupidity and contempt for adult authority, just drawn in marker pen instead of filmed in a squat.

But Deliberately, aggressively dumb — if you need any warmth or intelligence underneath the chaos, this offers none.

The Filth and the Fury2000no page yet

The Young Ones' punk aesthetic and anti-establishment sneer came directly from this scene — this film shows you the real anger and squalor the sitcom turned into slapstick.

Julien Temple's documentary puts you inside the actual punk movement that gave The Young Ones its safety pins and rage — the Sex Pistols' chaos, poverty and fury, filmed with the same anarchic energy it's documenting.

But A real, sometimes bleak account of addiction and exploitation — there's no cartoon violence here, just consequences.