The Young Ones: S&D (Characters rather than eps please)

Favorite now and forever: VIVIAN!
Least favorite: Mike. Funny, but too much the straight man most of the time.

I imagine Rik would be the worst to live with.

A lot of the eccentric stuff Neil did could just as easily have been Rik, like the incident above for instance. At that moment Rik was bored out of his brain and going through a serious ADD episode, and that would be exactly the sort of stunt he might have pulled but for his lack of balls.

I cant decide between the other three (ha - It was the other three, not me, I had no idea what was going on, it really was the other three ) I love them all for different reasons.

Vyv: "What I need is a drill, some hedgeclippers.... and some ordinary household bleach!"
Rik: "Hands up who likes me!"
neil: "Guuuyss! There's some dinner on the floor if you want it..."

Ben Elton, actually!

Rik Mayall had perfected an off-the-wall poet character, Rik, a pompous, radical prat. Mayall and his then-girlfriend Lise Mayer talked about the sort of home life such a bloke might have, and what other characters might live with him. Firstly they thought of 'Adrian Dangerous', the mad, fearless, self-abusing, heavy-metal-loving lunatic punk that Ade Edmondson portrayed opposite Mayall's Richard Dangerous alter ego in the Dangerous Brothers routine that was a popular part of their stage act. Then there was Nigel Planer's brainless, hippy character 'Neil' (who had also appeared in Boom Boom...Out Go The Lights). Finally, they envisaged for Peter Richardson a shifty, slightly mysterious and overwhelmingly 'normal' character.

With a quartet formed in his mind, Mayall saw the potential for a sitcom series and took the idea to TV producer Paul Jackson, who thought it was worth a try. But Jackson and Richardson had clashed over Boom Boom... so Richardson was dropped (he went off to develop The Comic Strip Presents... and, after casting around for a replacement, Christopher Ryan was found in his stead.

"Hey man, sleep gives you cancer, everybody knows that!"

"Hello, kitchen, hellooooo! My name's Neil! But don't bother remembering it cuz I'll probably soon be dead, anyway."

Anyways, worst character: The guy that plays the Balowski family. Argh! Fokof with your stand-up comedy routines, already!

"I'm not really foreign y'know. I do it to appear more SOPHISTICATED!"

Singing "Stupid Noises" while inexplicably dressed as Mussolini.

When the boss is giving you the sack
`Cos you've lost the new invoices..
Don't drink a bottle of sulfuric acid,..
Just make some stupid noises!

When it comes to picking favorites in general though, that's tough. It's pretty easy to single Mike or any of the Alexei Sayle characters as least favorite, but there are tons of reasons to like Neil, Rik and Vyv as characters. Neil, Rik and Vyv are the only even somewhat complex characters on the show... Neil because of his depression and geniune inability to get along in the world (like when he tells the story of how long it took him to get all of his pencils and gonks and erasers out, causing him to miss the test he was taking), Rik because he's obviously trying to be more radical than he is without really understanding a lot of shit ("president of the anarchy society," his mama's boy relationship with his parents and geniune horror when Vyv tells him they're dead), and Vyv for his relationship with his mother (and perhaps the fact that he's actually a med student). Mike has no external relationships, no real backstory at all. He's not exactly "normal," which makes him sometimes funny or interesting, but he's not nearly as human as the other three.

Ah, fuck it. I was gonna be undecided, but I think I actually like Rik the best as a character. Vyv and Neil make me laugh a lot, but Rik's just consistently less cartoonish.

Neil is more ignored the more ridiculous his behavior. In the graveyard scene in 'Nasty' Vyv makes the standard 'you look a right girly' dig at the Vicar in his hassock, while next to him, Neil is wearing a woman's plastic rain hat (which is something else perhaps more in character with mummy's boy Rik than Neil).

Mike staggering under the weight of the coffin in that scene, with never less than a foot of daylight between him and it, is a neat metaphor for the 'yuppyism' that was just getting a foothold then and which he, with his golf, his supposed 'coolness' and snappy dress sense, and his self-absorbed meanness, embodied.

And Rik oh-so-predictably interjecting that oh-so-obvious Bowie quote (and IIRC getting it wrong) and getting Liverpool-kissed by the vicar: when I saw that, my mind put every insufferably smug smartarse I had met in Rik's place.