Here he/she the fifth flatmate is, posing in a group photo—not even a still from the show. “Cousin It” much?
 
It’s like a gag straight out of Arrested Development, one that rewards maximum viewer attention and perceptual skills, and no small amount of repeat viewing. It also reminds one of the brilliant trick in The Simpsons, of embedding an entire Schwarzenegger-ish action movie called ‘McBain’, one small snippet at a time, over dozens of episodes.

So it seems that The Young Ones, the celebrated “punk sitcom” that ran on BBC2 from 1982 to 1984 and on MTV starting in 1985, had a running gag buried so incredibly deep that it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that nearly nobody noticed that it was even happening… for years.

Anyone who knows the show can list off the four flatmates in a matter of seconds—Neil, Rick (“Prick”), Vyvyan, and Mike-the-Cool-Person.

Four flatmates, easy peasy, right? But wait—there were actually five flatmates, and one of them never was given a single line of dialogue and could only be spotted in the background of scenes while other action was happening. Not just in a single episode or anything like that, but in every single episode of the first series. That constitutes 6 of the 12 episodes that were produced, the relevant episode titles are “Demolition,” “Oil,” “Boring,” “Bomb,” “Interesting,” and “Flood.” (These episodes featured musical apparances by Madness and Dexys Midnight Runners. Motörhead was in Series 2.)
 

Murky but unmistakable: The fifth flatmate
 
The fifth flatmate doesn’t have a name and, judging from his (her?) hairstyle, appears to have been a homage of sorts to Cousin It from The Addams Family.

Hilariously, one of the creators of the show, Ben Elton, was asked about the mysterious figure and he claimed to have zero knowledge of the character: “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about I’m afraid. There were four housemates plus the Landlord.”

However, a director from the show confirmed that the extra person in the scenes was not an accident. Geoff Posner went on the record thus:
 

So if my memory serves me correctly, Paul Jackson and I thought it would be fun to have some ghostly figure in the background of some scenes that was never explained or talked about. Hair all over the face so you shouldn’t be able to decipher gender either. The fact we forgot to do it consistently through the series shows what a bunch of amateurs we were in them days.

 
The findings were posted on YouTube—below you can click on the case for the prosecution. My mind is blown!
 

 
via Business Insider Australia

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The disgusting punk brilliance of ‘The Young Ones’