Wider Reading | The Young Ones' Prophecy

The Young Ones was good British comedy. If you're going to call me out on that fact then this post is probably not for you.

The genius of The Young Ones is not for me to explore at any great detail however; I will leave that to the plethora of pundits whose careers involve nothing other than appearing on I *heart* 1982 and '100 Greatest Comedy Things To See Before You Die of Heart Failure From Watching Too Much Television Comedy In a Way That Is Sure To Inspire Several Tragicomic Headlines in Newspapers For A Couple of Days Amid Swipes On The Coalition Government And Islam'. You know that show, right? It's on every Christmas whilst I'm upstairs on my own memorising Stewart Lee routines.

Anyway, The Young Ones was an amazing comedy which, in its incredibly surreal Boosh-bloodline way, provided cutting commentary on all manner of society's faults. The bit that has always stuck out most clearly to me though, is this 4-minute segment, a fake show called 'Nozin' Aroun'':



Here's the opening monologue:

Hi, my name's Baz and me and my mates thought TV just wasn't NOW, right? I expect, like us, you're not into all that stuff your OLD MAN's into, right? So we just thought we'd have a programme for us, right? And this is it: Nozin' Aroun'. Yeah! N-O-Z (the Z is for Zap!). It's a programmer FOR young adults made BY young adults and concentrating on all the subjects that young adults are interested in.

So, the point is that this is an absolutely abysmal piece of programming trying mercilessly to tap into a demographic in the most superficial of ways with the smug air of someone sat on a train, too busy tweeting quips on their iPhone to realise that they've missed Zeitgeist Central Station.

Every comedian has watched The Young Ones. And they all bloody love it. So why have 3 of the country's most revered television comedy personalities and Lauren Laverne managed to get themselves into a situation where they are contracted into auto-cueing their way through a whole season's worth of Nozin' Aroun' 2.0? You watch any episode of this show and tell me I'm wrong, I dare you.