The People’s Poet — The Young Ones Tee (1982–1984)
Angry, chaotic, and completely convinced of his own brilliance, Rick crowned himself The People’s Poet in The Young Ones—delivering wildly overdramatic political monologues to absolutely anyone trapped nearby.
Played by Rik Mayall at full intensity, Rick turned student radicalism into performance art: fist in the air, scarf flying, and zero self-awareness. The joke was never the politics—it was the ego behind them.
That title, The People’s Poet, became one of the show’s most memorable running bits, perfectly capturing the anarchic, anti-establishment energy that made The Young Ones feel unlike anything else on television in the early ’80s.
