Thirty-five years ago when BOB LARBEY’s latest sitcom with writing partner John Esmonde hit the small screen, he had no idea that over three decades later it would still hold such a fond place in the nation’s heart.
That sitcom, which became a British TV comedy classic, was THE GOOD LIFE.
Starring Richard Briers as 40-year-old Tom Good and Felicity Kendal as his wife Barbara, the series follows the pair as they pack in the daily grind of office life to try their hand at suburban self-sufficiency.
The Dream Team: Felicity Kendal (Barbara Good), Richard Briers (Tom Good), Penelope Keith (Margo) and Paul Eddington (Jerry)
Snooty neighbour Margo (Penelope Keith) and henpecked husband Jerry (Paul Eddington) aren’t impressed with the pigs, chickens, goat, and crops which appear overnight in next door’s garden.
The show ran for four series from 1975 to 1978.
In celebration of the show’s 35th anniversary, writer Larbey chats to entertainment journalist Jan Gilbert about comedy heroes, rebellion, and living his own good life.
The Good Life: Complete Series One has been digitally remastered and is out on DVD now in a 2-disc set.
MMM: Where did the idea for The Good Life come from?
Larbey: From our fevered imaginations! It came from thinking about a man who was approaching his 40th birthday. Forty seems to be one of those ages where people say, ‘Oh God, what have I done with my life? What can I do about it?’ That was the start. And the second thing was adding self-sufficiency.
MMM: Had that sort of life ever appealed to you?
Larbey: No way! Absolutely no way! [Laughs] The trouble with doing that is that you get older, as I’ve done over the years obviously. If I were doing it now, I’d be absolutely destitute!
MMM: What would your reaction have been if your next-door-neighbour had turned their back garden into a small holding with pigs, chickens, and goats?
Larbey: I’d have said ‘good luck’! I wouldn’t have been like Margo [Tom and Barbara Good’s next-door-neighbour], not at all.
Series One of The Good Life is on DVD now
MMM: Like Tom and Barbara in The Good Life, you have had your own moment of rebellion though, haven’t you? They chuck in their life of working in an office to go the self-sufficiency route. But you and your writing partner John Esmonde both had that moment of thinking that you didn’t want to work in offices any more, and gave that up to write…
Larbey: That’s absolutely true. We did it for two or three years in the evenings and weekends – we used to work during the day obviously. That was before we sold anything. Then we started to sell bits and pieces. Then we got offered a radio series, which was huge in those days.
And we worked out we could live for three months on the proceeds, so it was either now or never… you either jump or you stay at work and spend the rest of your life regretting it. So we thought we’d jump and we did. Fortunately we made a soft landing.
MMM: It must have been fantastic fun working on comedy shows with John…
Larbey: Yes, you should spend a good deal of the day actually laughing, which is a nice way to pass the time.
MMM: I read recently that you’d never actually been to Surbiton, the place where The Good Life is set. How did you come to set the show there?
Larbey: In those days it seemed to us to be the sort of epitome of suburbia. It seemed to represented suburbia. Why, I don’t know. We could just have easily have picked Sutton or Epsom or many other places, but Surbiton just sounded right.
MMM: Why don’t you tell me about the show’s casting, because apart from Richard Briers none of the show’s leads were known for their comic acting at that time?
Larbey: No they weren’t, and I think that was part of the reason for its success. They were like new faces. I mean they weren’t… they were experienced, excellent actors, mostly on the stage. But they’d not done any situation comedy, so they brought a freshness to it. They didn’t bring any tricks. They just acted it, which is what you should do.
MMM: Did you and John have any input in the casting?
Larbey: We didn’t have a great say in the casting. We didn’t know enough actors and actresses to be honest. We knew Richard Briers. He was attached to it from the start because the BBC was looking for something for him. So we met him and we liked him.
The only other one we suggested was Penelope Keith, who we saw doing a Benson and Hedges advertisement on television. There was all this smoke blowing in her eyes and she went [Larbey imitates a posh female voice] ‘oh, Benson and Hedges’ and smiled. It sounds awful, doesn’t it, that you recommend a terrific actress like that from a commercial.
On-screen husband and wife, Kendal and Briers
That’s the only name we recommended. The others were found by John Howard Davies, the show’s producer.
MMM: Were you involved in any other aspects of the show after handing the script over to the cast and director, or did you take a back seat after the hard work of writing the series?
Larbey: You move back a bit. We always used to go to the first day’s rehearsal for the read through and if it was long or short we’d try to do something about it on the spot, answer any questions anybody had. After that we used to clear off and leave them to it. We’d have just been standing around getting in the way basically.
MMM: What do you think was the key to the show’s success and its continued place in the nation’s heart? I mean it’s 35 years since it first appeared on the small screen and we’re still talking about it today.
Larbey: I know, it’s weird, isn’t it. I don’t know, I think it seemed to strike a chord with people. There’s a little rebellious streak in all of us. All of us at some stage think, ‘why don’t I….?’ ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if I…?’ And I think perhaps that touched a common heart. That’s the only reason I can think of.
MMM: What’s your own favourite storyline from the show?
Larbey: That’s a hard one. I think my favourite episode was one called The Wind-Break War in which we made all of our characters get drunk. We’d been sitting around one day when Richard [Briers] casually said, ‘If you want me to play a drunk, I can do that very well.’
And all the other three actors [Penelope Keith, Paul Eddington, and Felicity Kendal] said, ‘I can be drunk as well.’ So we thought we’d get them all drunk at one time. It was kind of funny because there was almost a crossover when Jerry [played by Paul Eddington] admitted that he’d always fancied Barbara [Felicity Kendal].
And in a very unlikely way Tom [Richard Briers] and Margo [Penelope Keith] almost come together. They’re about six inches away from a kiss when they’re interrupted. It was quite daring for its day really! We thought that Margo, who used to boss Jerry around something terrible, actually liked it when Tom bossed her about. So there was a frisson there.
MMM: What are your most vivid memories of making the show?
Larbey: The thing I remember best about the filming is the magnificent job that the BBC did on that garden, which wasn’t in Surbiton, it was somewhere else. But it was a real garden. They’d rip everything out and stick everything back and do seasons, and work out how far the crops had grown and how big the pigs would be. They did that wonderfully, it amazed me.
It was a tremendous amount of work. It’s fine for writers; you just sit at some rotten old table and write ‘there’s been a terrible storm, the garden has been destroyed’ [you can see this episode in the first series]. And then you think, ‘oh God, what I have done?’ But then the BBC did it beautifully. They wrecked the place. And then they had to put it back together again!
MMM: Is it hard to decide when to end a successful show like The Good Life?
Larbey: No it wasn’t. We’d been on a crest of a wave with it, once it got very popular. And quite honestly, John and I were beginning to run out of stories on self-sufficiency. We’d done veg, pigs, chickens, a goat… and there didn’t seem like there was anywhere else to go for us.
You can’t do another episode about pigs; you can’t do another episode about chickens. I think if we’d gone on, it would have gone off. I mean we could have carried on just about these two couples living next door to each other, but then it would have just been a show about neighbours, there wouldn’t actually have been anything about self-sufficiency.
MMM: How did your writing partnership with John work?
Larbey: We were totally interchangeable, we always worked together. We started to talk about what might happen and then we’d start to play all the characters ever so badly, but in our ears they were perfect!
And you just go into a stream of dialogue. Then we’d stop and try to remember what we’d said that made us laugh! They were fun days. Noisy days as well! In those days we had an office over a green grocer’s shop and I think the customers downstairs must have thought there were a couple of looneys upstairs, what with all our weird voices! [Laughs]
MMM: Are there any comedies that you look at today and think ‘I would have liked to have written that’?
Larbey: Currently I think Outnumbered is wonderful. The little girl [Ramona Marquez] is a real find. As for American comedy, I think Modern Family is ever so funny.
MMM: Have you noticed a shift in the way TV comedies are made over the years that you’ve been writing?
Larbey: Yes, I think there’s been a big shift. I think, first of all they’ve aimed at the wrong market – they’re very youth oriented. And I think they use the wrong ammunition. I’m not a puritan but a lot of them get very tacky very quickly.
I mean, years and years ago Frank Muir said to us, ‘If you can improve a line by swearing, don’t do it. It shouldn’t need it.’ And for me there’s a lot of stuff now that you wouldn’t watch with your kids, for example. It’s ‘put the kids to bed, there’s a comedy on.’ It used to be that you could sit down with children and watch that sort of stuff.
MMM: Who are the people who really inspired you in your comedy career?
Larbey: Galton and Simpson, it’s got to be, because of Steptoe and Son. We used to watch a lot of comedy in those days and that seemed to us to be just startlingly good. For us it was the first comedy that actually had drama in it.
There were bits in that when you could actually cry for the characters. And the hate was actually real. I kept thinking, ‘is he actually going to kill old man Steptoe?’ at one stage, ‘is he going to strangle him?’ It was startlingly good and I think that they were our heroes, Galton and Simpson. We never met them, but they were our heroes.
MMM: When you look back on your career now, do you feel you’ve enjoyed a good life in the comedy business?
Larbey: Yes, enormously, it’s lovely to get paid for doing something that actually gives you pleasure, and hopefully you’re giving other people pleasure too. When people say, ‘oh, I still like watching The Good Life’, it’s a very nice feeling.
