Falling in the mud and following your dream... self-sufficiency sitcom The Good Life at 50

Richard Briers was that suburban revolutionary, Tom Good, and Felicity Kendal, who played his supportive and cheerful wife Barbara, recalls how she landed the role: “I was in a play called The Norman Conquests in the West End, Richard was in the audience and after the show he came round and said he thought it was great, which was really nice because he was a very famous, wonderful actor that I didn’t know at all but I knew about.

"He said, ‘I’m going to do this little television series, may I send you the script for the part of the wife? It’s a new series, it may not do well because it’s a very unusual subject.’”

The Good Life’s producer, John Howard Davies, also went to see the play and thought Kendal would be perfect casting, as he did Kendal’s Conquests co-star Penelope Keith for the part of the Goods’ haughty neighbour Margo.

Kendal tells Radio Times, “I felt thrilled and very lucky to be working on a BBC sitcom, a new one, with Richard Briers, and Penny Keith who I’d been working with for the last nine months anyway, so we were already mates. They cast Paul Eddington [as Margo’s executive husband Jerry], who I had worked with on two television shows. I loved working with him."

The cast chemistry, and the character interactions, made the show a national, beloved institution. And according to Kendal, the dynamic was good from the start: “Dicky Briers was one of the great human beings that was also an actor. And we all worked well together.

"It was not a done deal that it would do well, but we invested in it because we liked it rather than we thought, ‘This is a snazzy job!’ It wasn’t at all – the BBC didn’t pay very well then. But it just worked and it was a very special job for all of us."

The show was written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, who'd already had hits for ITV with the school sitcom Please Sir! and its sequel The Fenn Street Gang. The Good Life was designed as a BBC vehicle for Richard Briers, one in which a plastic-toy draughtsman turns 40 and, instead of having a midlife crisis, breaks out of the rut and goes back to grass roots.

In episode one we see Tom Good pack in his job, plough up his lawn and set out to become "as damn-near self-sufficient as possible". There was something genuinely thrilling at seeing the Goods thumb their nose at societal norms by keeping pigs and chickens in suburbia, generating their own electricity and weaving their own clothes.

At the time Bob Larbey told Radio Times, "It’s a cliché, but good comedy writing does have a serious base to it... We try to make the situation real, so that when Briers is worried the rain might spoil his bean crop, then you should be concerned for him and not simply feel that he’ll be saved in the next line by the script. You need this reality for the laughs."

The Good Life has cultivated countless fans over the years, among them bestselling author John O'Farrell, who tells Radio Times: "Like all the great sitcoms, The Good Life isn’t really about the situation, it’s about the characters, and the very best only come to life when great writing connects with great acting like it did in this classic show. All four central characters feel like they could never have been played by anyone else, and The Good Life elevated them all to the status of instant national treasures."

O'Farrell worked on Spitting Image and Have I Got News for You and has co-written musicals including Mrs Doubtfire. "As a writer," he says, "I sometimes used The Good Life as an example of a show in which the audience never worry about the unanswered questions.

"A commissioning editor might say, ‘but we need to know why neither couple have kids’ or ‘we need to know the attitude of the neighbours on the opposite side’, but in truth no one ever worries about that. Audiences accept the universe they are presented and enjoy it on its own terms."

Friction can often form the basis of good comedy, and as Kendal elaborates, "The whole principle was that there were these two different couples. One was traditional, the other was much more hippie. So they wrote these slightly extreme combinations.

"But one of the things people found attractive was showing the way that good couples worked together. It’s like Friends in America... People want to be like that, we want love affairs to work, we want friendships to work."

Called on to muck out the pigs or dig hundreds of spuds, Barbara often wore overalls, dungarees and oversized togs, while Margo glammed up next door. Did Kendal mind this? “I loved it, I was always a tomboy. I wore men’s watches and boy’s jackets... I was never very happy with the short, frilly things one had to wear in that period.

"When I arrived in the '60s [born in the West Midlands, Kendal lived in India from the age of seven but returned to England at 17], it was all very girly-girly and it never, I felt, suited me. That was the style but, left to my own devices I was always in jeans and a T-shirt.”

Nevertheless tabloids still used terms like “sex bomb” to refer to Kendal on the show... “We lived in a strangely easy, lenient way in those days, people weren’t deeply offended by things so easily as they are now and if somebody said my goodness, you look really sexy in that, it was taken as a compliment, not as an affront to one’s dignity.

"It was a very much more non-judgemental time, so it didn’t occur to me to be offended – or it didn’t occur to me that I was the sexiest girl in the world. It was neither what I was after, nor was I offended by it. It’s like somebody saying, ‘You’re very funny’ or ‘You’re really scary’.”

The central lifestyle being followed by the Goods struck a chord with its audience, however. John O'Farrell remembers, "As a teenager I loved Tom and Barbara, to the extent that I bought the book on self-sufficiency that was popularised by the show. My parents took me to see Felicity Kendal play Desdemona at the National Theatre, but disappointingly Othello was nothing like The Good Life!"

And though he thought the Goods cool and anti-establishment, he wonders, while watching the show through a modern lens, whether "Tom made this massive life decision without really consulting his wife and perhaps today she would just send him to therapy!"

As for favourite episodes, Kendal says, “Some were more fun to do than others because they were more physical, with funny stunts, falling in the mud, the windbreak going down, the night shoots, and anything to do with the animals.”

Popular episode The Wind-Break War depicts a misunderstanding that leads to arguments between the neighbours. It ends, famously, with all four celebrating their friendship with Tom’s peapod burgundy, but originally that was not the case...

“It was scripted that the boys got drunk and the girls didn’t. One of the things the BBC thought was, ‘We can’t have our beloved Barbara and Margo getting drunk,’ so there was a little bit of resistance to changing it. But in the end they trusted us and John Howard Davies said, ‘No I think it would be much better if they all got drunk!’”

That episode also introduced grumpy jobsworth gardener Arthur Bailey, played by Timothy Bateson, who made the mistake of answering back to his employer (Margo).

It's a moment that stuck with John O'Farrell, even if his perspective has changed: "As I have got older I have grown to love Margo and Jerry – and slightly agree with the way they find their neighbours a bit smug and annoying! Jerry is wiser than anyone gives him credit for, Margo is so much more vulnerable than she first appears.

"The 1970s was a time of coming change in the UK, and when Margo berates Arthur Bailey, making him stand on newspaper, it is a foreshadowing of how Margaret Thatcher is about to treat the entire British working class."

But The Good Life wasn't just about the laughs; there was drama, and tears, to be mined from situations such as the Goods saying goodbye to their pigs, a storm turning their vegetable garden into a swamp, Tom's head being turned by an old schoolfriend of Barbara's and the very real prospect of moving house.

And what looked like being the finale still has the power to shock. In Anniversary, the friends are about to toast Jerry landing the top job at his company, JJM, only to return to the Goods' house and find that it has been vandalised, and they have been burgled. Jerry even offers Tom his old desk job back.

“I think they wrote it beautifully," says Kendal. "Instead of it being ‘Let’s go out on the biggest joke ever’, it was a bit of reality. It’s also a risk when you have a dream."

Nevertheless, we did see the Goods back on their feet in two subsequent outings including the Christmas special. And it was a relief to many that Tom hadn't gone back to the nine-to-five but stuck to his self-sufficiency guns. "It wasn’t preaching anything really except to try to live the life you want to live," says Kendal. "It wasn’t even that this is the only way to live, you’ve got to do this or that, but follow your dreams, basically."

The Good Life ended with, effectively, a Royal Command Performance in 1978. The show's most high-profile fan, Her Majesty the Queen, was in the studio audience for the recording of When I'm 65. “We were terrified, only because we didn’t want to let anybody down!" remembers Kendal.

"The way we worked was extremely casual – if we made a mistake we’d sort of fool around on the set and, I wouldn’t say use rude words but we would play silly-arse with each other and make fun of whatever the other had done, and we all had to do [the scene] again. There was this kind of tradition that we didn’t go straight through very often, we nearly always had a bit of a blip and went back.

"So that – which we had honed to a fine art – we couldn’t really do because we didn’t think that was quite appropriate. We were a bit nervous that things would go wrong in the wrong way. But in fact as soon as we got into it, it was a lovely audience and it was just great.”

After 30 episodes, the Surbiton sitcom finally came to an end. "It could have gone on indefinitely," says Kendal, "except that we all felt that it couldn’t get better, frankly, than when we ended it.

"The acting was a lot of fun and games, and we would tease each other on various levels, but my fond memories are actually when we were all getting ready or rehearsing, or we would all go out to an Indian meal once a week after we recorded. And we had a tradition of going to each other’s houses for a meal. That combination, which still happens in good companies, is the joy of being in this business."

Kendal is still working – she was seen in the hit TV show Ludwig last year – and aims to go back to theatre work after a summer break. Looking back to the '70s and '80s, she recalls “a glorious period of the BBC. I did a lot of work for them, it was a time of great freedom and it was such a looked-up-to establishment. We’d go driving into [TV Centre at] White City and feel incredibly privileged to be working there. Hopefully it’ll get back its mojo one day.”

After 50 years, The Good Life remains one of the most treasured of all our sitcoms. Its acting is impeccable, the scripts perfectly tooled and its DIY, grow-your-own subtext has never been more on-message.

But more than that, it leaves you feeling happy (it's very much this writer's "Desert Island Sitcom") and is utterly loved by viewers. Kendal thinks this is because it reaches out to the audience like “a big hug. I’m terribly proud of it. The way it was written is the major thing; without the writing you’ve got nothing to play with.

"It also had a fundamental lesson – we got it back in Covid, but we’ve lost it again now – that every day is special and the simple things are worth a great deal more than all the millions and the diamonds and the posh cars and the big houses. That is not a way to happiness – it helps, but it certainly isn’t a recipe for any kind of peace in your mind. And I think this is what The Good Life was saying: you don’t need all that stuff to have a great time.”

BBC Four will be showing The Good Life weekly from 1st April – all episodes are on ITVX Premium. John O’Farrell’s latest novel Family Politics is available now (published by Penguin, £9.99).

Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.