The recent repeats of The Young Ones on BBC2 on Friday nights have led to a new audience for the series first shown in the early 1980s. But did you know that because the original episodes were 35 minutes long the repeats cut five minutes from each episode, to fit the 30 minute Friday night slot?

There were two series of six episodes each. They were

First Series	Second Series
A funny thing happened... Oil Bomb Boring Interesting Flood	Bambi Cash Time Sick Nasty Summer Holiday

The Young Ones brought together a wide variety of comedy traditions. The 'radical' wing of the Goons and Monty Python was clearly an influence, as seen in the anarchic structure - programs seem to "free form" through a theme. Not only are there frequent interruptions by characters never seen again, but even the main characters will suddenly break from the story as if they had totally forgotten what was happening. For example in Bomb everyone is arguing over what to do with the bomb that has dropped through the roof, when suddenly they just break from the argument and go to watch TV instead. So typically even the main "story" consists of sudden lurches from one topic to another, there is no plot, but rather a series of series of incidents and happenings, usually loosely around one theme. What stops programs fragmenting totally is that although the scenes lack progression and development, the location remains fairly constant - typically three of four "locations" within one episode.

It is the creative and hilarious interactions between the characters that makes repeated watching of The Young Ones possible. The ability to sustain repeated viewing is rare in comedy - and The Young Ones has something of the quality that Monty Python sketches have in this respect.

The second influence on The Young Ones is alternative culture. Few if any comedy programs have been able to follow this. Vyvyan, Neil, Mike and Rick - the punk, hippie, spiv and middle-class radical - live as students, avoiding lessons, getting bored, trying to make money, having parties. It is extraordinary that no other comedy program has been able to produce similar characters. Even the writers of The Young Ones were unable to. The immediate follow-up of Filthy, Rich and Catflap all had older, almost middle-aged characters, and of course Bottom, Blackadder and The Thin Blue Line do not attempt to do so. The other links with alternative culture were the inclusion of rock bands on each show - from Madness to Motorhead, the use of "fascist" to denote someone with right-wing views or part who is of the "establishment", frequent diatribes by Rick at "Thatcher" and the main characters' general attitude to life.

The third influence is mainstream English visual humour. Vyvyan and Rick are slapstick clowns. Every episode has Vyvyan smashing chairs, windows, tables over Rick. This humorous violence is also reflected in the "violent" language (the most frequent term of abuse is "bastard") used in a humorous way.

Of the four main characters, Rick is the strongest. Neil is a typical hippie - smokes grass, has long hair, is a vegetarian, listens to Steve Hillage, has a zodiac chart on his wall. Vyvyan could pass for a type of punk - violent, nihilist, destructive. Mike is a typical spiv - wheeling and dealing, blackmailing his tutors, on the make. Yet Rick is a strange left-wing rebel. He frequently attacks Thatcher, he is in the "friends of Stalin" society at university, we assume he is responsible for the picture of Marx in the kitchen as we see him falling asleep reading 'Das Kapital' in one episode. Yet he also likes Cliff Richard, delivers a diatribe on "scroungers" and "horrid little Biafran children" in the DHSS and believes the police are basically good except for a "few bad apples". Why is this? The answer is, Rick has been brought up by right-wing middle-class parents, and deep down (half-unconsciously) holds to the views he was brought up with, but outwardly he is a left-wing radical - and this is his image of himself.

Nothing since The Young Ones has been able to match its creative style. The format has never been matched - the sudden imaginative changes of plot, numerous cameo appearances in the "interludes" - this allowed the variety that a sketch show format often provides, but avoided the patchiness that format provides by keeping everything interwoven with the reality of their student lives. So while the students are going through their usual rituals of fighting and bickering we see other worlds surreally co-existing with theirs: the snow queen from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, tiny devils, Easter bunnies, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, medieval knights and peasants, pirates, a land where interesting things constantly happen, a huge flood, a vampire, a mad gun man etc. This format seems to make time stand-still. At the end of one show, Alexi Sayle brings the "half-time score" and we genuinely imagine the show is only half-way through.

Of Monty Python it can be said often imitated, never equalled. It could be argued that Python has had a huge impact from NTNOCN, Who Dares Wins, Mary Whitehouse Experience to the Fast Show, which is hugely pythonesque. Yet no one seems able to even attempt to imitate The Young Ones, Girls on Top being compared at the time as a female version of TYO, but clearly very different.

It could be argued that shows such as Blackadder and Faulty Towers are "classics" because they bring together strong characters with ingenious and clever plots and great jokes, yet TYO goes beyond this traditional format, creating its own style and content, genuinely so new and different that so far it has never even been imitated