Music
The series' theme song featured the cast singing Cliff Richard and The Shadows' UK No. 1 song "The Young Ones". Throughout the series there are many references to Richard, as Mayall's character is a fan.
The theme over the end credits was written by Peter Brewis, who also created the incidental music on many episodes.
In 1984, after the second season, Planer (in character as Neil) reached No. 2 in the UK charts with a version of Traffic's "Hole In My Shoe". The accompanying Neil's Heavy Concept Album, a loose collection of songs and spoken comedy, included appearances by The Young Ones alumni Dawn French and Stephen Fry.
In 1986, the cast sang "Living Doll" with Cliff Richard and Hank Marvin for Comic Relief. The song, a reworking of his 1959 hit, reached the top of the UK, Australian and New Zealand Charts.
Eleven of the twelve episodes had a musical guest performing in the house or street. By including the groups, the show qualified as variety rather than light entertainment by the BBC and was allocated a bigger budget than a sitcom. This helped introduce several British bands to American viewers, such as Dexys Midnight Runners, Motörhead, The Damned, and Madness, who appeared in two episodes. The one episode that featured no musical act still fulfilled the variety criteria by including a lion tamer, whose presence also directly contributed to the plot.
Some of these performances were omitted from DVD release for copyright reasons. Some musical acts were also edited out for similar reasons on some satellite reruns.
| Episode number |
Episode name |
Band | Song |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series 1 | |||
| 1 | Demolition | Nine Below Zero | "Eleven Plus Eleven" |
| 2 | Oil | Radical Posture (with Alexei Sayle) | "Dr. Martens Boots" |
| 3 | Boring | Madness | "House of Fun" |
| 4 | Bomb | Dexys Midnight Runners | "Jackie Wilson Said" |
| 5 | Interesting | Rip Rig + Panic (with Andrea Oliver) | "You're My Kind of Climate" |
| 6 | Flood | no band; a lion tamer appeared to satisfy the BBC's variety criteria | |
| Series 2 | |||
| 1 | Bambi | Motörhead | "Ace of Spades" |
| 2 | Cash | Ken Bishop's Nice Twelve | "Subterranean Homesick Blues" |
| 3 | Nasty | The Damned | "Nasty" |
| 4 | Time | Amazulu | "Moonlight Romance" |
| 5 | Sick | Madness | "Our House" |
| 6 | Summer Holiday | John Otway | "Body Talk" |
Read more about this topic: The Young Ones (TV series)
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“If you really believe music is dangerous, you should let it go in one ear and out the other.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“The time was once, when thou unurged wouldst vow
That never words were music to thine ear,
That never object pleasing in thine eye,
That never touch well welcome to thy hand,
That never meat sweet-savored in thy taste,
Unless I spake, or looked, or touched, or carved to thee.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)