Radical Posture

My name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five Year Plan Sputnik Pravda Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. Me Dad was a bit of a Communist.

I was too young for the Young Ones when it was first broadcast, but to say it stuck around is a bit of an understatement.

By the time you were anything like sentient in the 80s or 90s you were aware of it. Even now, it’s absolutely insane. One of those once in a generation things like Brass Eye that makes you think ‘how did this ever get commissioned?!’ Vyvyan trashing his way through ‘The Good Life’ opening credits, screaming about how everything’s so nice.

Why can’t that happen nowadays whenever Michael McIntyre or Josh Widdecombe’s sitcom are on, I ask you? No justice in this world.

The design is obvious communism to tie in with Alexai Sayle’s demented frontman diatribe. Generally speaking the writers and cast were all part of that lefty, anti-esteblishment set that exponentially grew in the 80s after years of Bernard Manning-style mother-in-law jokes. And casual racism. Oh don’t worry. The country still has plenty of that. It’s just deployed with much more subtlety nowadays.