TV’s Good Life showed pathetic people doing stupid things badly, says Monty Don
IT WAS once the epitome of successful middle-class living, but it appears the Good Life is not all it was cracked up to be – at least according to Monty Don.
For self-sufficiency is a recipe for terrible food, malnutrition and bad breath, the gardener and broadcaster warns. Don says the notion of living off the land is a “non-starter”, condemning those who desire it to a life of “dreary repetition” and “humiliating failure”.
Writing in BBC Gardeners’ World magazine, Don takes aim not just at the idea of the “good life” but the 1970s sitcom itself, declaring it the “desperately weary japes of middle England doing stupid things badly”.
In a column about self-sufficiency, which he admits he once dreamed of himself, Don says it would be far more practical and rewarding to grow just some fruit, vegetables and herbs. He says: “While self-sufficiency is inevitably doomed to humiliating failure, selfprovision elevates the grower to selfesteem and a world of small but profoundly influential pleasures.”
Writing of John Seymour, and his books about living off the land in the 1970s, Don says they had been read by people who dreamed of the “good life”, but did not necessarily need to know the details. “I know my 20-year-old self was one of them,” he writes, although he now knows “that John Seymour, for all his many admirable qualities, was as much a fraud as we all are.”
In a final dig at the BBC sitcom, which starred Felicity Kendal and Richard Briers as a self-sufficient couple, Don says of Seymour’s work: “It spawned – and if nothing else condemns the book, then this is enough – The Good Life.
“I know that to speak ill of this TV series is tantamount to blasphemy, but I always thought Tom and Barbara were creepily pathetic, with only the wonderful Margot rising above the jolly but desperately weary japes of middle England doing stupid things badly.”
The full column is published in the August issue of BBC Gardeners’ World