Tag: TV

Nobody made being a total bastard quite as funny as Rik Mayall. 

When I first stumbled on The Young Ones in the late ‘80s during its inexplicable MTV late-night airing in America, I felt like I’d seen into a different universe. The anarchic gang of college misfits were all hilarious, but to me, Mayall’s Rick was on another level of twitchy, ego-free energy, willing to make himself look as sweaty and horrible as possible for the gag. He bounced perfectly off Ade Edmondson’s ultraviolent punk parody Vyvyan. 

Rik Mayall’s been gone 10 years now, a fact I still find kind of baffling. His comedy was so insanely energetic it seems impossible it should ever be stilled. 

Mayall was the patron saint of comedy that combined ego and humiliation in equal measures. 

Rick on The Young Ones was everyone’s worst nightmare of a pretentious, oblivious student, adopting pet causes left and right, constantly sure of his own righteousness and yet constantly trembling with his own self-hatred. You felt sorry for him but you also probably wanted to kick him right in his stupid face, too.

Nothing ever worked out for Rick, who hated everyone but hated himself the most. Mayall managed the extremely tricky wrangle of making this hilariously funny, a character who’s all twitchy id whether he’s trying to pick up “birds” at a party or insulting his roommates. Nobody ever spat out “Bastard!” quite as caustically as Mayall. 

Later on, in their follow-up show Bottom, Mayall and Edmondson refined the Young Ones formula by narrowing in on losers Rick and Eddie, two gormless young men hurtling towards pathetic middle age. Bottom, as good mate Bob recently recalled in his own blog, is a masterpiece of over-the-top comedy, where every gag is pushed as far as it will go and then some.

Mayall and Edmondson smack each other around like a Looney Tunes cartoon, are consumed with unrequited lust for the opposite sex and their own sleazy poverty. I like to pretend that Bottom’s “Richard Richard” and Eddie are of course The Young Ones’ Rick and Vyvyan about 10 years on, youthful idealism and identities ground away and living lives of quiet desperation. 

Later on, Mayall played the world’s most corrupt politician Alan B’stard in the witty satire New Statesman, and was great as blustery fool Lord Flashheart in Black Adder. He tried to break through in the US with the loud, antic cult comedy Drop Dead Fred, but it didn’t quite work – Mayall’s frantic man-child routine got grating quickly when stretched out to an entire movie. 

At his best, Mayall played insecure, hateful guys who can never quite figure out that they’re their own worst enemy. It’s a marker of his talent that the creeps and bastards he played still felt ever so slightly loveable. When Bottom’s Richard Richard gets a well-deserved ass-kicking and then sits there ugly-weeping, who doesn’t feel a twinge? Maybe it’s just me. Losers are inevitable more entertaining than winners. 

Rik was carried off by a heart attack in June 2014 at just 56. It’s probably the blackest of comedy to say so, but sometimes I wonder if that’s the way the Young Ones’ Rick, Bottom’s Richie and New Statesman’s B’stard all wouldn’t have gone as well, pushing their self-loathing energy until it burst. 

I can still watch those episodes of The Young Ones and Bottom over and over no matter how many times I’ve seen them, and Mayall’s comic skill, working himself up into a sweaty red-faced mess to get a laugh, gets me every time. I only wish we’d gotten a little bit more of him. 

“Come and knock on our door. We’ve been waiting for you. Where the kisses are hers and hers and his, three’s company too.“

Could there be a more swingin’ 1970s TV theme song? Come on, you know the words. We all do.

So while on holiday recently I was feeling a bit under the weather and, as you do, one evening I ended up watching four or five episodes in a row of ‘70s-‘80s camp sitcom Three’s Company in a row.

It was the first time in years I’d actually watched the show, but I admit that like most kids growing up in the ‘80s, I watched Three’s Company all the time. We watched everything, from classics like M*A*S*H and The Brady Bunch to also-rans like What’s Happening! and Manimal. That’s what we did in the olden days, before the eruption of a sprawling multiverse of entertainment options 24-7, when you simply watched ‘whatever was on’.

Watching a slew of Three’s Company in my vaguely sick bed recently was bizarre – I have trouble remembering what I ate for lunch yesterday, but as these goofy sitcoms unfolded I nodded in recognition – ah yes, here’s the one where they went to the farm; here’s the one where Jack makes a mob boss linguini. How the hell do I remember a sitcom episode I last watched in 1983? The inanity of childhood sitcoms, the quintessential comfort food, imprinted itself on my brain. 

The 1977-1984 run of Three’s Company seems a strange relic now, nearly 50 years (!!) since it debuted, a broad bawdy farce perched between the groovy ‘70s and a more uptight ‘80s Reaganland. The premise is pretty much the definition of problematic by modern standards  – hep cat Jack Tripper (the late, great John Ritter) pretends to be gay so he can live in an affordable apartment with two attractive young single women (Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt) without offending their prudish landlord Mr Roper (Norman Fell). Hijinks ensue, somehow for eight entire seasons! 

Loose-limbed and amiable Ritter was a national treasure, of course, and like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers he carries the show on his shoulders. The women of Three’s Company fared less well; I know we were all supposed to like the late Suzanne Somers but I found her blonde ditz irritating and Joyce DeWitt’s Janet was often just a straight woman. I rather liked Priscilla Barnes’ Terri, who replaced Somers in the later years, and seemed a bit more sly and unpredictable. 

The central homophobia that drives Three’s Company is incredibly dated, but the show, mostly, was lewd and campy rather than hateful, even though there’s plenty of cringe-worthy farce humour revolving around gay misunderstandings and affairs.

Unfortunately, a lot of the ‘humour’ relies on the premise that the worst possible thing would be for Jack to actually be gay.

I grew up in a world where “fag” was the number one insult of choice by and for teenage boys. I got called one an awful lot for a few years and I’m ashamed to admit I probably called other kids it too a few times. It was stupid. 

Jack’s homophobic landlords, despite usually being the butt of the joke for their overwrought gay panic, do leave a bit of a sour aftertaste. Even watching the show as a kid, Stanley Roper and Mr Furley’s limp-wristed gay-bashing jibes seemed forced and unfunny to me.  Norman Fell’s oily Mr Roper always struck me as a little too nasty and sinister. You felt he meant it. Knotts’ goofy Furley, on the other hand, definitely felt like a closet case, and the show eased off a lot on the gay panic as it ambled along. The series ended with Jack Tripper, of course, marrying off to a nice girl. 

Did gay characters actually ever appear on Three’s Company as more than a punchline? I don’t have enough of an encyclopaedic memory to recall if they did, but the show was far more about the idea of being gay as some strange unknown rather than any kind of cultural exploration of what that meant in 1978. 

While there’s a lot of things about the modern world that are pretty terrible and backwards still, the gentle wave of gay acceptance just during my adult life makes me feel a glimmer of optimism sometimes. A good half-dozen or so of the friends I grew up with in high school later came out as gay, and I was overjoyed to see how happy and complete they seemed. I can’t imagine what it must have been like trying to keep that quiet in the ‘80s, which feels now the last real gasp of generally accepted wider cultural homophobia. 

Still, there’s plenty of people out there who still see nothing wrong with calling someone a “fag.” It’s nowhere near good enough today, of course, and a lot of people want to roll the clock back or worse. 

Three’s Company was a flimsy, unsubtle and silly show that didn’t intend to change the world like so much of today’s “prestige, event TV” – honestly, spending 800 words or so going on about it seems wildly overegging it – but at the same time, gazing back from what seems the impossibly futuristic date of 2024, it kind of shows how the world has changed, slowly, ever since Jack Tripper first knocked on that door.