Beloved 70s show The Good Life was one of the most enduringly popular of all British sitcoms, and was even adored by the late Queen Elizabeth.
Cited even now as useful shorthand for suburban social-climbing types (‘the new neighbours are a bit Margo-and-Jerry’, it made its debut 50 years ago this week, not with a squeal but a squelch.
The property used as the Goods’ home was owned by Michael and Margaret Mullins in Kewferry Road, Northwood, Middlesex.
The Mullinses, who bought the property two years before, let the garden be dug up so they could start afresh after filming.
The house next door where Margo and Jerry ‘lived’ changed hands twice. By 1978 it was owned by the Tindalls, who were grilled by Inland Revenue over reports the BBC was giving them enough to pay off their mortgage.
They said the proceeds ‘might have taken a couple of friends out for a meal, but that was about it’.
Today, however, the four-bedroom home is worth an incredible amount – as the property, which was bought for £475,000 in 2007, would fetch £1.5million today.
Written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, The Good Life aired for the first time on Friday 4 April 1975 at 8.30pm on BBC1, pitched against Des O’Connor Entertains on ITV. The amiable crooner O’Connor, it seemed, didn’t have much to worry about.
The property used as the Goods’ home was owned by Michael and Margaret Mullins in Kewferry Road, Northwood, Middlesex (pictured)
Viewing figures were lacklustre, and the next day’s reviews for this comedy about a middle-aged, middle-class couple swapping the rat race for suburban self-sufficiency were, at best, middling.
The BBC’s own Audience Research Report came back with some damning adjectives. In the eyes of some unimpressed viewers, the first episode, titled Plough Your Own Furrow, was ‘childish’, ‘tedious’ and ‘unfunny’.
Ratings improved in the ensuing weeks but not enough to stop the new sitcom’s leading man, Richard Briers, fretting that the sustainability premise had fallen on stony ground.
By taking the role of Tom Good, whose 40th birthday (and being overlooked for a company cricket match) is the catalyst for a dramatic lifestyle change, he thought he might just have made ‘a terrible mistake’.
Instead, as it turned out, he had been given the part of a lifetime. Tom was both maddening and endearing, and Briers played him to perfection.
No less unforgettable were Felicity Kendal, who played Tom’s dippy, spirited wife Barbara, and the pair cast as their friends and neighbours, the imperious but lovable snob Margo Leadbetter, appalled to see the next-door garden dug up and turned into an allotment, and her long-suffering husband Jerry (who secretly admired the initiative).
Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington brought the Leadbetters to life with the most immaculate comic timing.
Gradually, the viewing public realised that The Good Life was better than good; it was wonderful.
(L-R) RICHARD BRIERS as Tom Good, FELICITY KENDAL as Barbara Good, PAUL EDDINGTON as Gerry Leadbetter and PENELOPE KEITH as Margo Leadbetter
Written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, The Good Life aired for the first time on Friday 4 April 1975 at 8.30pm on BBC1. Pictured: Felicity Kendall and Richard Briers
By the autumn of 1976, with the third series in full swing and even Geraldine the goat elevated to a household name, it was attracting upwards of 17 million viewers every week.
That was well over a third of Britain’s population. And one of them was the Queen, who rarely missed it.
Later, there was even a royal command performance, a special episode recorded in 1978 with the Queen in the audience and a small brouhaha brewing backstage, because Eddington, a left-leaning Quaker, had declared that he would not feel comfortable bowing to the sovereign after the show. In the event he did bow, but went ‘a bit pink’.
Much of The Good Life’s success was to do with the quality of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey’s writing and their glorious characters, but the show’s particular genius, the reason it lives on in everyday discourse (‘I hear they’ve gone all Tom-and-Barbara!’), lay in the casting.
It wasn’t meant to turn out the way it did. Producer John Howard Davies (who’d had his own burst of acting fame as the title character in David Lean’s 1948 film Oliver Twist) originally wanted the gentle Scottish actress Hannah Gordon to play Barbara. And for Jerry he wanted Peter Bowles.
In the event, both politely declined, and Briers never let Bowles forget it. When they starred together in the Alan Ayckbourn play Absent Friends, Briers was forever winding Bowles up, knocking on his dressing room door to tell him he’d just received another hefty cheque for The Good Life.
Maybe the show would still have been a hit, but it is impossible now to imagine The Good Life without the joyous screen chemistry of Briers, Kendal, Eddington and Keith. Briers was already a star, yet the latter three were all but unknown to mainstream television audiences.
Keith’s most striking screen role had been as a lesbian German au pair in the 1970 film Every Home Should Have One, a smutty sex comedy written by Marty Feldman, Barry Took and Denis Norden.
Beloved 70s show The Good Life was one of the most enduringly popular of all British sitcoms, and was even adored by the late Queen Elizabeth. Felicity Kendal and Richard Briers pictured
She then edged somewhat closer to Margo as the overbearing Clara Hittaway in the BBC’s 26-part adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels.
And as soon as he cast her, Davies knew he’d struck gold. She was a perfect fit as ‘that middle-class, slightly authoritative woman with a touch of [dog trainer] Barbara Woodhouse about her and a sexiness that was indefinable’.
There was nothing hard to define about Felicity Kendal’s sexiness as Barbara, and nobody objected when she won the first annual Rear of the Year title in 1981, back in the days when such awards were deemed innocent fun rather than rampantly sexist.
Davies cast her as Barbara after seeing her in another Ayckbourn play, The Norman Conquests, and it was then Kendal who recommended Eddington. One of British television’s great comedy quartets was complete.
It wasn’t just the choice of actors that made The Good Life special, it was also the setting for the two couples’ various misadventures.
The actual street was in Northwood, Middlesex (see left), but it was another masterstroke by Esmonde and Larbey to fictionalise it as The Avenue, Surbiton.
Self-sufficiency in Surbiton wasn’t just nicely alliterative, it was also, somehow, a consummately funny idea.
The Avenue, too, was the perfect name, encapsulating the middle-class gentility exemplified in such different ways by the Goods and the Leadbetters.
By the time the show came to an end in 1978, after four series, the four principals were all keen to try pastures new. But Briers was under no illusions. ‘That’s it, Penny,’ he told Keith. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do now, The Good Life is what we will be remembered for.’
With Eddington going on to make the sublime Yes Minister, that’s arguable. But certainly The Good Life (destined, of course, to be repeated for the rest of time) made a mighty impact in its three short years.
By 1980, a record 51,000 smallholdings had sprouted up in Britain, and everyone knew the main reason why.
- The Good Life is on demand on ITVX Premium and Sky/NOW.