Category: The Young Ones
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Watch-along The Young Ones starts this Saturday
Looking for some anarchic fun during the lockdown period? I am starting a weekly watch-along on Twitter of the classic alternative comedy The Young Ones, starting with the debut episode ‘Demolition’ this Saturday night (25/04). I will be tweeting about the show from 9pm Adelaide time (this 9.30pm for the Eastern states and 12.30pm in the UK).…
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New article: Thatcherism and The Young Ones
This is just a short post to let everybody know that my new article on depictions of Thatcherite Britain in The Young Ones has been published in Agora. A version of the paper can be found here. If you can’t access it properly, send me an email and I’ll ping one your way. As usual,…
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The Conversation (UK) On Rik Mayall, The Young Ones and Thatcher
I just thought I’d mention that The Conversation (UK) has published a short piece by myself on The Young Ones as Mayall’s ground-breaking achievement and what the show reveals about Britain under Thatcher in the 1980s. You can read it here.
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In tribute to Rik Mayall: The Young Ones, Thatcherism and the People’s Poet
It is very saddening news to hear of the sudden death of Rik Mayall at the age of 56. As Rick, the lefty sociology student in The Young Ones, Mayall helped create one of the greatest contemporary portrayals of life in Thatcherite Britain, while indulging in surreal and off-the-wall comedy. The longevity of The Young…
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South Africa and anti-Apartheid in British popular culture before Mandela (1976-1983)
This post is partly inspired by my work on The Young Ones and the cultural depictions of the history of Thatcherite Britain. In the first episode, ‘Demolition’, which aired in late 1982, Rick and Neil have an argument over whether the vegetables in the meal were from South Africa (there was an international campaign for a boycott…
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‘It’s a video nasty!’: Some background to the The Young Ones episode
Part of my research into my article on The Young Ones and Thatcherite Britain has involved looking at the moral panic concerning the ‘video nasties’ of the early 1980s. The boom in video sales in the first half of the 1980s provided a challenge to the authorities that classified film in the UK and there was…
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Research query: Did the UK left wing press cover ‘alternative comedy’?
I am currently turning my series of blog posts on The Young Ones and Thatcherism into a journal article and am trying to find an answer to the following question – did the left wing press in the UK (especially the CPGB’s Morning Star and Comment or the SWP’s Socialist Worker) feature any articles/reviews of ‘alternative comedy’ in the early-to-mid-1980s? While…
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What can The Young Ones teach us about Thatcherism pt 7: Higher education and class
In this series of posts, I have already looked at issues of police racism, unemployment, capitalism, left-wing activism and women in the television show The Young Ones, but one of the major themes I have overlooked so far is the topic of higher education and class in the 1980s. The Young Ones was essentially about…
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What can The Young Ones teach us about Thatcherism pt 6: Women and sexism
The ‘alternative comedy’ scene of the early 1980s was supposed have rejected the sexist (and racist) comedy of the 1960s and 1970s, but there remained many antagonisms between male and female comedians within the scene. Similar to other arenas of progressive and left-wing politics, feminism was praised in the abstract, but women within the ‘alternative…
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What can The Young Ones teach us about Thatcherism, pt 5: Activism and the left
In the last post, I looked at how neo-liberal capitalism and market populism was lampooned in The Young Ones and it is pretty clear that the show often critiqued Thatcherism from left-of-centre position. However that did not mean that the show didn’t also criticise the left, with many jokes made about the self-importance of the…
New Historical Express 