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Sense - Catalonia Today
6 December 2015 2.00 h

'We all love toilet humour'

Nigel Planer (London, 1953) is still popular in Catalonia for his role as Neil in The Young Ones the BBC comedy that became iconic on the TV3 channel

Did you know how pop­u­lar The Young Ones was in Cat­alo­nia?
I had no idea. It was great to find out that after so many years the se­ries is still a thing and the char­ac­ter so well-loved. Dur­ing the film­ing of TV3's Catalunya Ex­pe­ri­ence, peo­ple were stop­ping me to take self­ies; I couldn't be­lieve it.
Why do you think that is?
The se­ries was broad­cast in other lan­guages but Cat­alo­nia is the coun­try in which it was most pop­u­lar. In the 1980s, MTV showed it in the US, but now no one there re­mem­bers it. I think that it has some­thing to do with Eng­lish hu­mour, but also with the con­cept of child­ish hu­mour. In a way, it is also scat­o­log­i­cal hu­mour and in Cat­alo­nia there is the fig­ure of the Ca­ganer (Crap­per), which only ex­ists here. Per­haps that ex­plains why The Young Ones, with its toi­let hu­mour, was so well-liked by Cata­lans.
It was also a phe­nom­e­non in the UK, and yet they only made 12 episodes.
It was a shame. Part of it was be­cause of the pro­duc­ers and scriptwrit­ers; there were per­sonal prob­lems. But it was also a con­cept of a com­edy for­mat that was some­what pre­ten­tious. For ex­am­ple, there were only 12 episodes of Fawlty Tow­ers (1975-1979). They did not want to be com­mer­cial; they wanted it to be spe­cial and that is why they only made a few episodes.
Is there any of you in Neil?
Neil is part of me and I can­not leave him be­hind. Be­fore the se­ries, Neil ex­isted as a char­ac­ter I cre­ated. He has a lot of me in him: I have pho­tos of when I was 17, play­ing the gui­tar, with long hair, writ­ing folk songs, be­fore going to India.
What do you think of tele­vi­sion today? Is there any­thing quite as ground­break­ing as The Young Ones?
There are lots that I like. But there aren't any as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as The Young Ones. I love the IT Crowd. On Chan­nel 4 there is Peep Show, which is like The Young Ones in that it is very dis­re­spect­ful. In gen­eral I like what I see on tele­vi­sion, but there is noth­ing like The Young Ones, which com­pletely changed the com­edy scene in Eng­land. The only thing as ground­break­ing as The Young Ones was Monty Python.
TV3 has long shown British come­dies, from Black­ad­der to Mr. Bean. Is Eng­land still the world cap­i­tal of com­edy?
It is like pop music: Eng­land has a lot to offer com­edy. But it is not as pro­fes­sional as in Amer­ica; they can make 26 episodes of Friends a year. For ex­am­ple, there were only 12 episodes of the Ricky Ger­vais ver­sion of The Of­fice. Then the Amer­i­cans made some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent out of it. It was los­ing rat­ings and so the scriptwriter de­lib­er­ately began to make the char­ac­ter of Steve Car­rell more sym­pa­thetic to au­di­ences.
Did you know Cat­alo­nia be­fore com­ing to film for TV3?
I knew Barcelona, as I vis­ited many times be­fore, but not Cat­alo­nia. The TV3 pro­gramme came out of the blue: it has been a fan­tas­tic ex­pe­ri­ence, and have been a type of hol­i­day just for me! It has also been hard work, be­cause there was a lot planned. I love trav­el­ling and I write about my trips in dif­fer­ent news­pa­pers and blogs.
Has it changed your idea of the coun­try?
Yes, be­cause I did not know how im­por­tant the lan­guage was. When I say in Eng­land that I am going to Barcelona, they think Spain and that you need to brush up your Span­ish. Until I did the pro­gramme, I was not aware of this dif­fer­ence. Nor about the va­ri­ety of land­scapes, moun­tains, beaches and cities. Girona seemed very Ital­ian to me, the same as Tar­rag­ona; I was fas­ci­nated by the Roman his­tory.
The flags hang­ing from bal­conies are part of the land­scape. What do you think about the process?
Do you think it will hap­pen? We have just had a ref­er­en­dum on Scot­land in the UK. David Cameron was very clever to make a lot of con­ces­sions to Scot­land and in the end in­de­pen­dence was less at­trac­tive than his vi­sion of the union. From what I can see, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment is much more rigid and that makes in­de­pen­dence more de­sir­able. Here the lan­guage is very im­por­tant and if Spain wants to keep hold of Cat­alo­nia it will have to make more con­ces­sions... But I don't know much about pol­i­tics.
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