Vyvyan Basterd | |
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Born |
Cia 1950? |
Family |
Unnamed Mother |
Friends |
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Likes |
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Dislikes |
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Vyvyan Basterd is a central character of The Young Ones and is portrayed by Adrian Edmondson.
Personality and Characteristics[]
Vyvyan is a psychopathic metalhead medical student. He has orange dyed & spiked hair and four metal stars seemingly embedded into his forehead. In the episode Interesting, he drinks a pint of blue liquid which makes his hair fall out and the number 666 is visible on the side of his head. He rarely interacts with Mike, largely ignoring him or seemingly not caring about him one way or the other, though he does sometimes seek out Rick to silently confer with each other when Mike says something that baffles them.
He is extremely violent and regularly attacks Neil and Rick with himself, pieces of wood, cricket bats and other large objects. Ironically, this antagonistic relationship between Rick and Vyvyan makes them virtually inseparable, as the two spend by far more time together than with the other housemates, Add to that the fact that the two claim to hate each other but are never more than five feet apart in any scene from the series. They often sit next to each other on the sofa in the drawing room or at the kitchen table. Unlike Neil and Rick, Vyvyan appears to come from a working-class background (something Rick incorrectly believes himself to have).
Vyvyan owns a talking Glaswegian hamster called Special Patrol Group (SPG for short), which he later renames “Cliff Richard” (after Rick says SPG is a stupid name for a hamster in Demolition) of whom he is very fond, although SPG is also frequently subjected to Vyvyan’s extreme violence. This is usually provoked, such as when SPG bit Vyvyan and made him destroy his cardboard submarine in Flood or plugging in the TV after Vyvyan swallowed it in Bomb. Vyvyan's favourite television program is ''Bastard Squad''.
Details of life[]
Vyvyan’s mother is a barmaid and former shoplifter, who before Boring had not seen Vyvyan in 10 years and has no idea who his father is. Vyvyan occasionally displays feats of superhuman strength and resilience, such as surviving a pickaxe through his head, moving entire walls with his bare hands, lifting Neil above his head in a fight with Rick, biting through a brick (making the comment that some of the house’s bricks explode) and even being decapitated and re-attaching his own head.
He eats just about anything: televisions, dead rats, caviar and cornflakes with ketchup. In Bambi, Vyvyan displays impressive mathematical talent (working out instantly that he has worn his three pairs of underpants 269 times each since their last wash), yet he cannot tell the time from a watch. In Flood, he develops a potion to transform a person into an axe-wielding homicidal maniac. He claims “it’s basically a cure… for not being an axe-wielding homicidal maniac. The potential market’s enormous!”.
He has more friends than the others but “…apparently he doesn't like any of them.” He seems to lose interest in other people fairly quickly in favour of hanging out with and/or tormenting Rick, who captivates Vyvyan’s attention; for example, in Interesting, he starts doing ‘push ups’ to impress the girls but once Rick sits down with them, he prefers to sit by Rick and chat. In Time, he almost instantly ignores the pretty girl when he learns of Rick still being a virgin. He frequently causes havoc or damage such as wiring the doorbell to a bomb to “pep it up a bit” and adding a small car engine to the vacuum cleaner as previously it “looked a bit on the tentative side”, which then proceeds to suck up the carpet, the floorboards and a friend of Neil’s. The vacuum also prompted one of the few clashes between Vyvyan and Mike; when Mike admonished Vyv not to use it anymore, Vyv replied by calling him a “poof”.
Vyvyan is the only member of the group to own a car; a yellow Ford Anglia with red flames painted along the sides that he is extremely possessive of, as seen in Summer Holiday when he cries as the result of crashing it and again in Cash when he reminds Neil that “No, no Neil cause if you so much as touch my car I’m gonna kill you! Remember?” Strangely this does not seem to apply to Rick, as he readily agreed to let Rick sit in the front of it with him to solve the problem of not having any seats earlier in the scene. By far his most interesting relationship is with Rick, as the two are completely in sync and although they are one of the most aggressive couples in the flat, it can be changed on and off like a switch, going from fighting to sitting on the couch discussing a comic at the drop of a hat.