In times like these, we all long for the Good Life
The classic British self-sufficiency sitcom may be 45 years old, but it has never felt more timely, says Michael Hogan
Rarely leaving one’s house and garden. Social interaction largely limited to chatting to neighbours over the fence. Making do and mend rather than buying new. Improvising meals from rustled-up ingredients.
It might be celebrating its 45th anniversary this weekend – having first aired in April 1975, when the Vietnam War ended and the Bay City Rollers topped the pop charts – but The Good Life has never felt more timely.
Written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, whose previous hit was schoolteacher sitcom Please Sir!, the BBC One comedy was inspired by Larbey’s 40th birthday and the pair joking about how a midlife crisis often seemed to accompany this milestone. Hence their new creation opened with protagonist Tom Good (Richard Briers) on his own 40th, realising he could no longer take his career seriously – well, it was designing plastic toys to go in packets of breakfast cereal – and quitting the rat race to live off the land.
Tom and his wife Barbara (Felicity Kendal) instead adopted a simple and largely self-sufficient lifestyle in their Surbiton semi. The writers picked Surbiton at random because it sounded like the embodiment of suburbia. They later admitted they weren’t even sure where it was.
The Goods took a rotavator to their neatly manicured lawns, turning both front and back gardens into plots to grow crops. This horrified their kind but conventional neighbours, Margo and Jerry Leadbetter (the writers reasoned “we’ve got a Tom, may as well have a Jerry”).
Played by Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington, the Leadbetters veered between disparaging and supporting the Goods’ alternative lifestyle. They turned their greenhouse into a chicken shed and bartered with the rag-and-bone man for a range cooker. They kept a goat, memorably named Geraldine, a cockerel called Lenin and two pigs called Pinky and Perky, who promptly escaped into Margo’s garden and wreaked havoc with her hydrangeas.
They built their own generator, run on methane from their animals’ manure. They fished, farmed and harvested their own fruit and veg. They took up weaving, pottery and tried to dye their own wool with nettles, with decidedly mixed results. Then there was their potent homebrewed wine, known as “peapod burgundy”.
The Good Life quickly became a smash hit. Its comfortably middleclass setting was reassuringly familiar. Its humour had warmth but also bite. Even that jaunty animated title sequence – with birds and bees flying around a flower, while composer Burt Rhodes’s theme tune tinkled away – looked charmingly home-made. At its peak, the show attracted 15million viewers each week, a quarter of the UK population at the time.
A key part of its alchemy was the interplay between the leading quartet – a quality cast that a contemporary comedy would kill for. All four actors were on prime form and their chemistry crackled. Tom and Barbara veered between spiky bickering and sweet romance. Margo hectored and henpecked the more laid-back Jerry, but underneath she was a pussycat.
Prissy Margo would peer over the fence in horror at the Goods’ horny-handed activities – and occasionally join in, only to fall flat on her back in the mud. As we saw when all four hit the organic grog, Jerry secretly fancied Barbara, while Tom’s flirtatiousness made Margo go all a-flutter.
The show sharply satirised the ideologies of both lead couples: the snobbish, social-climbing Leadbetters and the smug, holier-than-thou Goods.
The Good Life had a fantasy element, an air of achievable aspiration. It felt quietly radical as it kicked against mindless materialism and advocated getting back to nature. Rewatching it today – it’s still repeated regularly and available for streaming – viewers can detect the early flowerings of the Green movement. It was credited for a resurgence in hobby farming, homebrewing and allotment ownership.
Now we’re all in lockdown, such practices seem not just appealing but advisable. Millions of us are turning to grow-your-own gardening as demand surges and supermarket shelves are emptied. Seed manufacturers are reporting a huge growth in sales and The Royal Horticultural Society has seen a spike in traffic to its website.
Tom Good might not exactly be a role model – in fact, Briers hated the character, feeling he’d selfishly bullied his wife into giving up her lifestyle – but his fanatical endeavours showed the benefits of self-sufficiency, as well as how not to do it. Remember when the Goods caught fleas? That’s how some of us feel right now, having gone semi-feral while working from home in loungewear.
Ratings reached 21million for the 1977 festive special, which saw Tom and Barbara invite the Leadbetters around to share a self-sufficient Christmas. They wore paper hats made from newspaper (Margo insisted on The Telegraph), played improvised party games and said “crack!” as they pulled home-made crackers. Cue Margo’s bafflement at her cracker joke: “The ooh-aah bird is so-called because it lays square eggs.” When it was exported to the US, The Good Life was renamed as Good Neighbours – which is also something we should all aspire to be right now. It made household names of the leading quartet, who all went on to land their own solo sitcom vehicles.
Kendal became a wellington boot-clad sex symbol. Esmonde and Larby would later reunite with Briers for another suburban gem, the underrated Ever Decreasing Circles.
The Good Life bowed out in 1978 while it was still at the top, clocking in at 30 episodes in total. Let’s hope this lockdown doesn’t outstay its welcome either. In the meantime, let’s raise a glass of peapod burgundy to this still-pertinent comedy classic.
The series had both a fantasy element and an air of aspiration
The Good Life is available for streaming on BritBox and Amazon Prime Video. The Complete DVD Box Set is £15.99