A sitcom classic turns fifty this week. Only fifty? It feels like The Good Life has been with us forever, yet it originally ran for just four short seasons of seven episodes each over a period of two years. In the world of television, less is always more. Creators John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were right to end the series when they did, before it could get stuck in the solipsistic self-referential rut that has been the fate of most long-running British sitcoms (cf. Last of the Summer Wine).
I was watching plenty of television during the week when The Good Life made its debut in April 1975: my diary lists The Goodies, Are You Being Served, Dave Allen at Large and The Liver Birds; yet I missed out on this future classic (I tended to mistrust any new television series unless it came from the likes of Gerry Anderson). I’m certain I saw trails for The Good Life and must have decided it wasn’t for me. Aged fourteen, I tended to prefer the more anarchic comedy of The Goodies, and the smutty, Carry-On style humour of Are You Being Served. I’m not sure if I even noticed that the new sitcom came from the writing team who had previously given us Please Sir!, which would certainly have been a point in its favour. Either way, I was not tuned in on 4 April 1975 to witness the Goods setting out on their self-sufficiency journey.
A second series began in December, but we were visiting our grandparents on that particular evening, and again I failed to pick up on it. It doesn’t get mentioned in my diary at all until Friday 9 January 1976. That week’s episode was Mutiny – an acknowledged classic, wherein Margo finally gets to star in the Sound of Music and Jerry gets fired (briefly) by ‘sir’ (Reginald Marsh). As an introduction to the series, it was hardly typical, with the Goods’ lifestyle scercely getting a look in. My diary entry is intriguing:
‘Watch the Good Life, in which their next-door neighbour (Strand – from Special Branch) loses his job because of the Sound of Music.’
The fact that I’d singled out Paul Eddington strongly suggests that this was indeed my very first encounter with the Good Life, and strange as it may seem, he was the only member in the cast whom I recognised. Richard Briers hadn’t done much television in recent years – I was too young to remember him from Marriage Lines a decade earlier – but I must have known his voice as the narrator of Bob Godfrey’s cartoon series Roobarb, not to mention countless commercials. Felicity Kendall and Penelope Keith were both, like Briers, seasoned theatre performers (perhaps that’s why the series was so good), but I knew neither of them.
I stuck with the Goods for the rest of the series (just two more episodes) and was finally able to catch up with series one when it began a repeat run on Tuesday 1 June. The third series began on 10 September, in the same Friday evening slot it had occupied since the beginning, and usually merited a mention in my diary. On Friday 1 October, I missed most of the episode (I Talk to the Trees) on account of a thunderstorm – our mum always insisted on turning off the television during a storm. Even today, when I’ve seen all four series many times over, this episode still feels slightly unfamiliar, especially the scenes where Noel Howlett (a veteran of Esmonde and Larbey’s Please Sir!) appears as an old gardener who converses with his plants.
When the series returned on 10 April 1977, there was no suggestion that it was to be the last. I mentioned it in my diary most weeks, and only passed comment on the final episode, Anniversary, which I speculated may be the last ever. I was almost right: barring the Christmas special, shown on Boxing Day, and 1978’s one-off ‘Royal Command’ episode, this was indeed the end of the line for the Goods.
Anniversary always bothered me. Esmonde and Larbey were taking a huge risk having such a downbeat ending, but the cast brought it off superbly, despite the odd nervous titter from the audience when the Goods’ trashed living room was revealed. For me, the designers went a shade too far with the destruction – the nazi graffiti was unnecessary – but I suppose the point had to be made, and a few ripped cushions wouldn’t have been enough on the small screen. Interviewed for a retrospective in 2011, Penelope Keith spoke of her sadness at seeing the familiar set that had remained unchanged over four series defiled, and I’m sure many viewers felt the same. Of course, it was all put right for the Christmas episode, but clearly this had been filmed before the destructive finale of Anniversary.
Wikipedia’s entry on the series, citing no sources, claims that the Christmas special was originally intended for the Royal Command production, but that the Queen’s schedule made it impossible to attend. This seems highly unlikely. The living loom set had been trashed beyond salvation at the end of Anniversary but still has its original, untouched appearance in the Christmas special. The actual command performance episode, When I’m 65, was written to order (which disproves the Christmas episode theory), and didn’t make use of the Goods’ living room, so it seems reasonable to conclude that the set was never restored after Anniversary. Which seems a shame…
In fact, the Royal Command edition was almost the first of a continuing series of one-off Good Life episodes: interviewed for the Radio Times in 1978, producer John Howard Davies spoke of his hope to do more ‘just occasionally, because we all like working together so much.’ It’s a shame that nothing came of this ambition...
All four series were repeated through 1978, but after this, there would be no complete repeat runs for some time. Random episodes were shown between 1980 and 82, billed as ‘Comedy Classics’. Other sitcoms were given similar treatment in this era – Dad’s Army, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads and others were reduced to the status of random schedule fillers. Finally, a full repeat run got going on Sunday 2 January 1983, in the unusual slot of 17.25 – more often occupied by classic serials – but the series ended an episode short on Sunday 6 February.
The missing final episode from series one turned up at last on Friday 22 April in the more grown-up slot of 19.00, leading into a complete run of series two. After a two-week break at the end of June, the series was once again reduced to a ‘comedy classic’ filler, with two episodes from the third series. This haphazard repeat run never reached series four, apart from a Boxing Day afternoon outing for Silly But It’s Fun: the series started again from scratch on Wednesday 5 September 1984, and it was back in a children’s hour slot (17.25). Granted, it was by now nine years old, but surely still deserving of a place in primetime? This repeat run again failed to reach series four, ending just three episodes into the third series. By now, we’ve reached January 1985 and the series is fast approaching its ten-year anniversary (which was to pass unnoticed). Series four, by now the least repeated of all, finally began a repeat run on Friday 25 May, in the same teatime slot of 17.30. Notably, the last episode, Anniversary, was omitted.
By this time, I was renting a VHS recorder and committing episodes to tape whenever I could, but compiling complete runs proved difficult on account of the BBC’s scattergun approach to scheduling. For the record, the first episode I ever managed to get down on tape was the Christmas episode, Silly, But It’s Fun, when it rolled up on New Year’s Day 1981.
By the mid 80s, there was a new Richard Briers sitcom occupying a prime Sunday evening slot – Ever Decreasing Circles had begun in January 1984, so it’s perhaps understandable that the BBC didn’t want his earlier show given too much prominence in the schedules. Between 1986 and 1987, only a single episode of The Good Life made it to air, and it wasn’t seen again until 18 September 1988, now relegated to the kind of late-night slot where one might expect to find Sgt. Bilko. Series one was dashed off in a mere ten days, with episodes appearing on various nights of the week, in the same late night slot. The bizarre scheduling was for a reason – the late night episodes were there to lead viewers into live coverage of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
Normal service was resumed on Tuesday 3 January 1989, and – hooray! – Tim and Fatima were finally back where they belonged, at 8pm. This run of repeats took in all of the second and third series, but viewers would have to wait over a year for series four, which finally turned up on Tuesday 20 November 1990, still in its primetime 20.00 slot. Once again, the repeat run ended without sight of the downbeat Anniversary which was fast becoming the series’ holy grail. In fact, the episode went unaired on the BBC for a staggering 21 years, between December 1978 and November 1999, which must be some kind of record for such a popular TV sitcom.
In the 1970s, before the era of home recording, it wasn’t unusual to see popular sitcoms appearing as paperback novelisations, and The Good Life was no exception. What was unusual was the publisher – Penguin books were not normally associated with television spin-offs, and the two Good Life paperbacks were their first such endeavours since the Quatermass script books of the 1950s. Adapted from the first series, The Good Life appeared in 1976, with More of the Good Life following in 1977 with a selection of stories from series two and three, the adaptations this time credited to Christine Sparks.
Today, it’s not hard to find The Good Life on air – it’s been a staple of various freeview channels for decades, and BBC’s iPlayer has made the entire series available to view: a far cry from the corporation’s formerly haphazard approach to repeats. The series itself has long since been acknowledged as a classic of the genre, but for a time it was derided in some quarters for its middle class attitudes. The Young Ones famously had a go at it: but where The Young Ones has aged very badly and now looks like a post-punk artefact of the early 80s, The Good Life, for all its 70s suburban mannerisms, is as funny today – if not funnier – than when we first encountered it half a century ago.
What makes the series so enduring? To me, it’s like two sitcoms for the price of one: either of the two couples, Tom and Barbara, Margo and Jerry could easily have carried a series on their own. The genius of Esmonde and Larbey was in juxtaposing their disparate attitudes and lifestyles. They did it again, and with equal success, in Briers’ 1980s vehicle, Ever Decreasing Circles, which saw his neurotic little Englander rubbing up against a suave, effortlessly successful next door neighbour.
How long will the series endure? Its environmental credentials make it, if anything, more relevant today than it was back in 1975, and as society polarises increasingly towards a wealthy elite lording it over the poverty-stricken masses, there will be even more cause to sympathise with Tom and Barbara as they struggle to make ends meet. It is also, increasingly, beginning to look like an historic document of ‘how we used to live in the 1970s’ – Tom and Barbara’s dowdy living room, with its random mix of furnishings, was typical of many I remember, as indeed was the Leadbetters’, with its reproduction antiques and draylon sofas. But above all, there will still be cause to watch the series as long as there are people left who have a sense of humour and the ability to laugh at themselves…
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| The two Penguin paperbacks: the strapline 'now a BBC TV comedy series' suggests it had started life as a novel, which we can perhaps put down to wishful thinking on Penguin's part. Note how Margo gets in on the act on the second volume... |
