#RIP Richard 'sugar flavoured snot' Briers from the bloody Good Life. Bloody bloody bloody! #referenceforthecomedyfan
— Steve Oliver(@SteveOliver76) February 18, 2013

To the casual observer, the above tweet might seem disrespectful. I'm sure that it won't have gone over too many heads as a reference to a scene in The Young Ones in which Vyvyan launches into a tirade against the middle class cosiness of The Good Life. It is fair to say that the sitcom as a form of entertainment needed a kick up the arse, (if I thought more than six people would understand the reference I'd of course said that it needed a kick up the eighties), in the same way that punk was much needed to improve the musical landscape of the time. The Young Ones, and indeed the whole alternative comedy boom of the late 1970s, came along at exactly the right time. 

The Young Ones was ever so slightly before my time, my first awareness of it was in 1986 and the release of the first ever Comic Relief single 'Living Doll' with Cliff Richard. I had wanted to watch the Comic Relief concert on television but my mum wouldn't let me because of the language content. When the concert was released as an LP, I wasn't even allowed to use my own pocket money to buy it. I had to wait until I was twelve to see The Young Ones repeated on BBC2, which became the talk of the school the day after, as we were all in the same boat age-wise, and things weren't automatically released on video back then. In fact, (and I hate the fact that my memory allows this in, but not something important that my girlfriend told me two days ago), The Young Ones was shown as a comedy double bill with Police Squad. We were advised to watch Police Squad by a science teacher, who had allowed his guard to slip especially to tell us this. I went to a very strange school that still thought it was one hundred years earlier, the teachers all wore capes and addressed us by our surnames, and we had to keep our uniform intact while walking to and from school, a loose tie with an open top button sent the staff into a rage. Yet here he was asking who liked comedy, and if we did then to watch an old American spoof detective show. Of course we all thanked him at the start of the next lesson.

After tweeting my Young Ones paraphrased tribute to Richard Briers, I watched The Good Life on YouTube, and also found the episode of The Young Ones, (titled Sick, it was the second episode of the second series) that contained the Vyvyan rant. What struck me was that The Young Ones, as much as I love it and can watch it time and time again, has actually been dealt a crueller hand. It looks incredibly dated when viewed next to the very show that it tried to knock down. The Good Life could have been made today. The fact that the world is financially fucked means that more and more people are assessing their outgoings and resorting to such money saving measures as baking their own bread and repairing things rather than throwing them away. If I had the time, I would grow my own vegetables, and keep chickens for eggs.

Incidentally, as an adult I found the Comic Relief LP in a second hand record shop and texted my mum to tell her that I'd bought it. We had a jokey conversation in which she told me I still wasn't allowed to listen to it, but I did anyway, (she won't read this), and it was shite.

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