Abigoliah: Hello there! This is All British Comedy Explained, a podcast in which I finally learn about all the British comedy shows I’ve been missing out on all these years. I’m comedian Abigoliah Schamaun, and to guide me through our comedy labyrinth is my good friend and writer, Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there.
Abigoliah: Hello. How are you?
Tom: I’m okay. I’m a little bit frazzled. I’m a little bit overcommitted at the moment.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But this podcast remains very important. And I’m not going to deny our army of listeners and viewers the chance to catch up with us once again.
Abigoliah: And we have to say, the reason why you’re a little frazzled and overcommitted is I always say you’re a writer. We never say what you write. What have you got coming up? Or it might be on by the time this comes out, won’t it?
Tom: No, it won’t quite be on. But yeah, I’ve got a play coming up about the Wapping print strike.
Abigoliah: Ooh. The wet ass pussy strike. I can’t wait.
Tom: So, this was the mid-80s. Rupert Murdoch sacked 5000 print workers overnight and seamlessly moved production of his UK papers to computerised printworks in Wapping. And the dispute that followed lasted the better part of a year, thanks in no small part to the stubbornness of union leader Brenda Dean, the only woman running a major trade union in Britain at the time. So this is a real clash of two very forceful personalities.
Abigoliah: Awesome. And where is it going to be on?
Tom: The King’s Head in April 2026.
Abigoliah: The King’s Head in Islington. Right. Because there are two King’s Heads because one time I went to the wrong one. Yes, there’s actually many, but yeah. So the King’s Head. And what date did you say it was?
Tom: April.
Abigoliah: April.
Tom: It’s on for five weeks.
Abigoliah: You guys got to check it out. I mean, Tom can explain some British comedy, but he can also explain strikes and unions in the 80s as well. The man can explain everything through the medium of art.
Tom: Anything you want to plug…
Abigoliah: Probably. Oh, yeah. Speaking of writing, my first book is coming out.
Tom: Amazing.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So it’s coming out on June 18th, so we have some time, but it’s available for pre-order right now. It’s called Neurodivergent Moments: Sex, Sunscreen, Turtles, and How Not to Pack a Suitcase. It’s…
Tom: Amazing title.
Abigoliah: Thank you. Co-written by my other podcast partner, Joe…
Tom: Hisss…
Abigoliah: I’m poly-podcast. And we’ve all talked about it, but Joe Wells and I wrote it. It’s a series of essays. The book will be out June 18th. It is available for pre-order on all bookshops. But if you order from Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town, you can get a guaranteed signed copy if you order it, pre-order from there.
Tom: Amazing.
Abigoliah: So, yeah, check that out.
Tom: Or as I say about my own books, if you’re very lucky, you might be able to find one of the very rare unsigned copies.
Abigoliah: I think we’re gonna have the same thing happening when we release ours.
Tom: But maybe we should say as well that we have just launched a Patreon. So if you’re enjoying All British Comedy Explained, you can sign up for as little as £3 a month where you’ll get uninterrupted ad-free listening. And for £5 a month you get special bonus mini episodes like the one we’re going to record shortly after this. So today we’ll be talking about: is self-sufficiency the pipeline to reform?
Abigoliah: And if you are an American listener, unlikely. But you could also call this: is homesteading the pipeline to MAGA? That was the other possible title. But yeah, what are we watching today?
Tom: We’re going to watch The Good Life.
Abigoliah: Okay. And tell me what self-sufficiency is.
Tom: So self-sufficiency means coming off the grid, means you grow or otherwise produce your own food.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: You take responsibility for your own electricity. You don’t buy things. You barter for what you need and so on.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And it was a modest craze in the mid-70s.
Abigoliah: Okay. And The Good Life explores this.
Tom: It does.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Now you’ve actually seen a tiny bit of The Good Life. If you have finished watching The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: I don’t think I’ve gotten to that episode then.
Tom: So The Good Life is much more typical of BBC sitcoms of the mid-70s than Fawlty Towers. Fawlty Towers is this unicorn, these incredibly densely plotted, tightly wound farces. But most sitcoms of the time were much more gentle, much more domestic. And The Good Life really typifies that. But it’s a particularly good example of the type. But it was so much the kind of poster child for that kind of cosy, slightly nostalgic style of comedy that – and Ben Elton feels a bit bad about this. He has at one point, The Good Life title sequence start, and then, thanks to some slightly ropey chroma key video effects, Vyvyan rips up the title sequence and goes on about how much he hates The Good Life and all of its syrupy wholesomeness.
Abigoliah: Is that later in the second season?
Tom: I don’t remember which episode it’s in.
Abigoliah: Okay, cause I don’t remember that. But I feel like I have to rewatch the second season because I watched, like, you know, half of it, an hour and a half. But I think I was, like, too distracted.
Tom: Double-screening.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It’s not made for double-screening.
Abigoliah: Yeah, it’s not, it’s not. Or just like, I really do try not to look at my phone when I’m watching stuff, but, like, you know, I’ll be in the kitchen. Yeah. It’s not because they don’t repeat the plot 27 times back in the day.
Tom: Yes. The patented Netflix show-and-tell method.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So this show began airing in 1975. That’s actually the same year as Fawlty Towers. So I’ll give you a few different markers. 1975 is the year Bill Gates founded Microsoft.
Abigoliah: All right.
Tom: It’s the year that Queen released their album A Night at the Opera, which includes the track “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
Abigoliah: Classic.
Tom: And P.G. Wodehouse was knighted by the Queen and then died six weeks later.
Abigoliah: Well. Poor guy. How old was he?
Tom: Oh, he would have been very old. P.G. Wodehouse, you might remember, was Ben Elton’s first comedy hero.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: I don’t know if you’ve seen or read any P.G. Wodehouse. Jeeves and Wooster?
Abigoliah: No, but I feel like he’s one of those guys that I’ve probably seen a meme quote of him. You know what I mean?
Tom: He was just a brilliant comic writer. And his invention of Bertie Wooster, the spoilt gentleman who gets into scrapes, and Jeeves, his butler – he’s not technically a butler. He’s a valet. He’s a gentleman’s gentleman. A butler is somebody who runs a home and organises the rest of the staff. Jeeves is a valet. He’s just a manservant. But he is unflappable and always manages to get Bertie out of whatever trouble he’s in. And it’s just a brilliant comic pairing.
Abigoliah: Are we going to cover that at some point?
Tom: Well, they’re novels.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: And so there are adaptations, including featuring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
Abigoliah: Oh, fun.
Tom: But they’re not eligible.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Okay. Fair enough, fair enough.
Tom: All right, so let me tell you about The Good Life.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: This began with the BBC wanting a new project for one of its comedy stars, Richard Briers.
Abigoliah: A name I do not know.
Tom: Well, I did mention it last time because, very briefly, he was the first person considered to play the role, eventually taken by Bernard Cribbins in The Hotel Inspectors episode, the one who doesn’t like using telephones.
Abigoliah: Okay, so a name I knew from the last episode, of which I totally remember that conversation.
Tom: Yes, this will be on the test. So he was a huge comedy star in the 60s and thereafter. He’d scored a big hit with Marriage Lines in the early 60s opposite Prunella Scales, who played Sybil Fawlty.
Abigoliah: Still not a real name.
Tom: And he’d carried on working on stage and television, but he hadn’t played the lead in another successful sitcom, and the BBC were thinking we should do another Richard Briers project. So producer John Howard Davies approached writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey to see if they had any ideas. Esmonde and Larbey had been writing together since the mid-60s. They’d graduated from sending in sketches to I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, which was the precursor to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. And then they did a radio sitcom called You’re Only Old Once, and then had a major TV hit with Please Sir!, starring John Alderton on ITV, where he was the teacher of a school. And all the kids looked about 40 because they were played by grown adults.
Abigoliah: It’s like watching the last season of Stranger Things.
Tom: Exactly, yes, very much so. Now there’s a thematic strand which emerges here of the horror of suburbia. And I’m really interested to find out if there’s any kind of American equivalent, but let me describe the British version. So post-war, the British government prioritised housing outside of congested inner cities. And at the same time as the war ended and rationing ended and so on, the population became more prosperous, the middle class grew. And so people could afford cars or to take regular commuter trains. So this middle-class suburban living became the norm for several million people who would live out in the suburbs, and you would go into the city to do your job, then you’d come home again.
Abigoliah: I mean, as far as old sitcoms that depict that, there’s someone is shouting at their device right now, this one, and I can’t come up with something off the top of my head, but, like, that’s what Mad Men depicts.
Tom: Mad Men? Exactly, yes. Precisely. So Mad Men is probably the closest I can think of.
Abigoliah: But if you look at all those sitcoms from, like, the 50s and 60s, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Bewitched. They all take place in the suburbs. It’s all like green lawns. The Brady Bunch even.
Tom: That’s what you see parodied in early episodes of WandaVision. Yeah, the white picket fence and…
Abigoliah: And that all happens in suburbia. I don’t think there’s a through line of, like, dad going to the city for his job, but yeah, I mean, suburbia came up in America post-World War Two as well, but for different reasons, I would say, than it did in the UK. Like the war yielded a lot of prosperity for America, whereas it did the opposite for you guys because your country got bombed to hell and back. Whereas we made a lot of money and, I think you’ll know, as I’m sure you learned in your history class, America also won the war.
Tom: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It was one-nil to America.
Abigoliah: Yep. We saved the day, as we always do. And I will not hear anything else about that.
Tom: Thank God we still have America out there protecting the world today.
Abigoliah: Oh, God. Jesus Christ. So you can edit this out of the podcast. But one time I was talking to my mum on the phone, and, you know, my whole family is just living, and like, they all have ulcers now. Like, they’re just so stressed and scared. And my mum was like, I can’t believe, I can’t believe what America has become. We’re now the axis of evil. And I was like, that’s not incorrect, mother. Like, you’d like to think it’s hyperbolic, but it’s like, no, you pretty much summed it up. Yeah. Anyways, moving right along. So tell me about The Good Life.
Tom: So for a lot of people, this was a perfectly pleasant way to live. But there were some writers who saw existential angst among the comfort. So you get things like Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party or The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which we’re going to be watching later in this season, and The Good Life.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So this is the way it came about. Richard Briers was around 40. And so the writers thought, that’s a time when you might be kind of at a crossroads in your life. And so they wanted…
Abigoliah: And as someone who has just turned 40. You are.
Tom: So what they came up with was that his way out of the rat race would be another 70s cultural touchstone: self-sufficiency. So this is kind of, it’s a combination of things like the early green movement, concerns about inflation, the oil crisis, and a general sense that there was an earlier time when things might have been better. So going through all this alone would be dull. So Tom Good, as Richard Briers’ character was named, was given a wife called Barbara. And then, for contrast, there needed to be a stridently social-climbing next-door neighbour, Margo. And then they wanted to give her a rather kind of henpecked husband, Jerry, who could be stuck between his fearsome wife and his slightly crazy best friend. Most of these parts were essentially filled after one trip to the theatre to see Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests. Do you know Alan Ayckbourn?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: He’s been a very prolific playwright for a great many years. He has his own theatre in Scarborough. His plays regularly come to the National or the West End, and he writes again about these suburban lifestyles and comedies of manners. And he’s probably written 20 or 30 plays.
Abigoliah: Okay. Is he, like, kind of like a Noël Coward type of guy?
Tom: I mean, more modern.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But not a million miles away.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Maybe a little bit less brittle.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Felicity Kendal was warm and charming and would make an ideal wife for Richard Briers. Penelope Keith was imperious and commanding, but with a wonderful sense of comedy, and she was perfect for Margo Leadbetter. Ayckbourn was at school with John Howard Davies and later accused him of casting plagiarism, to which Davies pleads guilty. So that just left Jerry Leadbetter, and it was thought that Peter Bowles would make an urbane contrast to Richard Briers. He’d played smooth villains in countless adventure series, and had already worked with Richard Briers on a different Ayckbourn play, Absent Friends. But at that time Bowles was trying to escape television, and he turned the part down.
Abigoliah: And to go to more theatre and stuff.
Tom: More movies and more theatre. And that opened the door for Paul Eddington. He’d been acting since the 1950s, but hadn’t been a series regular before, and he was thrilled with the offer.
Abigoliah: Oh, good. So he’s the one who got it?
Tom: He’s the one who got it, Paul Eddington. They also needed…
Abigoliah: Do you know if Bowles, like, regretted it? You always hear about how people turn down certain jobs and were like, oh, whoopsie daisy.
Tom: So when we come to where are they now, you’ll find out what happened to Peter Bowles. And the short answer is no, not particularly.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: I mean, the show was a huge hit, and I think he would have been absolutely fine as Jerry, but he doesn’t have to worry. He had a really nice career.
Abigoliah: Okay, cool, cool, cool.
Tom: Now, the other thing they did was find a location. So again, remember how these shows are shot, exactly the same as Fawlty Towers: interiors in the studio in front of an audience, exteriors shot beforehand on 16mm film on location.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So they need a house. In fact, they need two houses, because this is a show about next-door neighbours. And the owner of one of them…
Abigoliah: Can I have a guess of the location they use?
Tom: Sure.
Abigoliah: Can I have two guesses? I have two guesses. My first one might be perfect for the 70s, but I don’t know my British history too well. Was it in Essex?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: And secondly, was it in Kent?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: Damn.
Tom: But you’re thinking in the right lines because it sort of needs to be within 50 miles of Television Centre because people need to go there and come back.
Abigoliah: And also, I’m thinking those are commuter towns, like people live there. And especially Kent is known for, like, being more of a conservative place.
Tom: These are the outer boroughs of London. So the series is set in Surbiton, which is in south-west London.
Abigoliah: Oh, yes. I’ve taken the train there once to do a, yeah, perfectly mediocre gig.
Tom: So on an ordinary show like this, you go around, you’re trying to find, do these look right? Are they reasonably accessible? Are the people who own them going to let us come and film them on a regular basis? But in this case, the owner of one of them needed to allow the BBC to plough up the back garden.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: Bring livestock in and then potentially keep coming back to do that for several years if the show was a hit.
Abigoliah: And did they get paid loads of money for it?
Tom: I mean, it’s the BBC, they didn’t get paid loads of money, but they would have been paid a fee for sure.
Abigoliah: And they let that happen?
Tom: Yeah, because the series ran for three years.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So they found a location in Kewferry Road in Northwood, north-west London. That house is still in private hands, and successive owners have kind of got used to occasional comedy fans making pilgrimages there to see the building for themselves.
Abigoliah: That’s hilarious. My friend who’s a stand-up comedian – I don’t see why I can’t say his name – Paul Thorne. The exterior of his house was used for Pennyworth, the television show about Alfred. And as he likes to say, in the last ten years, his house has been on television more than him.
Tom: But that is annoying. Reminds me of Simon Evans’s gag about how expensive parking meters are.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: There’s a guy working in McDonald’s who can look out of the window and see a parking meter that makes more than he does.
Abigoliah: Well, he said, obviously, because he’s been in show business forever, he was really strict on what they could and couldn’t do. And he’s like, you have to be so careful if they’re using your house as a location, because if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. So it was like they could use the exterior and I think like the atrium. And then they’d be like, can we just come inside to, like, set up some lights? And he was like, no. And then it was like really cold. And they were like, can we just come inside? Can the crew come into, like, the front room to, like, warm up a bit? And he was like, no, because he was just like, if you’re gonna use more of my house, you have to give me more money. And I just love that about Paul Thorne. He was like, there is a contract. And he was his house’s agent, and he made sure that the house got everything it needed and not any more.
Tom: Yeah, yeah. You can’t allow for territory creep.
Abigoliah: Oh, you gotta be very careful.
Tom: So the only other thing to say, really, before we go and watch it is that it took a little while to find its audience. Fawlty Towers was an obvious sensation by the end of its first series. The Good Life did okay. Some positive reviews, fairly middling viewing figures, about 5 or 6 million, which is…
Abigoliah: Did you say what day and time it was on TV?
Tom: This would have been prime time BBC One, whereas Fawlty Towers was on BBC Two, but the ratings for the two shows were similar, with only about 5 or 6 million. But the BBC pressed on with the second series, which went out in late 75 and early 76, only months after the first series. And now things really started to take off. By the time the second series finished, it was getting up to 20 million people watching.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And it became part of the national conversation.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: But we’ll come to what happened afterwards when we’ve watched it. So based on what I’ve said so far, what are you expecting?
Abigoliah: I am expecting the neighbours to be really upset because they have, like, a water desalination contraption in their house. I expect there to be a joke about canning foods. I think there’s going to be, like – so my brother was a ranch foreman for a bit, so this is just knowing how it can be if you’re, like, living in the middle of nowhere on a farm – there’s going to be, like, a sheep that’s more of a pet than livestock that walks in and out of their house all the time.
Tom: I mean, hard to do on a BBC budget, but I still remember how impressed you were that The Young Ones got a live elephant.
Abigoliah: I was gonna say, like, other things I’m like, did they do this? And you’re like, can’t afford it. They got a live elephant for a sketch that had nothing to do with the actual plot of the episode.
Tom: On a pre-record day.
Abigoliah: Yeah, but they got a live elephant. The London Zoo doesn’t have live elephants. The London Zoo does not have a live elephant, they can’t fit them into the zoo. But The Young Ones got a live elephant.
Tom: We didn’t talk about this when we did Fawlty Towers, but I might just mention it as a little extra point of interest. Remember I told you that filming was delayed, and then that meant one episode was super delayed and went out months after the rest. So in the time that they had to consider how that episode was going to be shot, it’s now called Basil the Rat, and it’s the one in which there’s a rat loose in the hotel at the same time as there’s a public health inspector trying to do his rounds. And Bob Spiers, the director, realised that they weren’t going to be able to wrangle a live rat in front of the studio audience. So that’s the only episode of Fawlty Towers that does have a pre-filming day.
Abigoliah: Oh really?
Tom: They had a pre-filming day on the set where they did some rat shenanigans, partly with a rat puppet pulled along on a wire, which is not particularly convincing. Yeah, and partly with a live rat that had a handler and was brought to the set and cosseted and managed and persuaded to do what it needed to do.
Abigoliah: Oh. That’s cute. You know what I was thinking? And I didn’t say it on air last time. But with Fawlty Towers having such a big break between season one and season two, and so did The Young Ones.
Tom: Only two years between series on The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: I mean, here’s the thing with, like, the way TV is made now, like, you think, as I mentioned before, Stranger Things, years between seasons, and especially as an American, we’re all up in arms and we’re like, this isn’t how it used to be. You used to get a season a year, you like, which is, I think, a better way to make television because then you remember what happened in the previous season, but this has been happening since the 70s and the 80s, this whole….
Tom: Fawlty Towers is a bit of a special case. What happened here with The Good Life is more typical. It’s a hit. The BBC likes it, so they just say, great, make us another six.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But the thing is, making six episodes of The Good Life doesn’t take very long. The big problem that shows up at the moment is, like, making ten episodes of Pluribus takes longer than a year. Yeah. So there kind of is no way to do a season of Pluribus a year.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t seen Pluribus, so I don’t really know.
Tom: I mean, or, you know, sub Stranger Things or whatever show you’re watching at the moment. Severance. These are really complicated shows. And to write, shoot, edit, do all the post-production takes substantially longer than a year.
Abigoliah: See, the thing is, is that I agree. But I also disagree because they filmed Lord of the Rings all in one go and then released them one after another.
Tom: True, but that was a six-year project. Yeah, and they started with a 300-page script.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: No one’s going to pay you to write season two of Severance until season one has been a hit. And that’s the problem.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Tom: So then the clock starts again once episodes, let’s say two and three go out. And now you’ve got at minimum 18 months from a blank piece of paper to episodes ready to be delivered to Apple.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I forgot about that. You have to wait for the renewal, which you never know if you’re going to get. So why would you do all that work beforehand? Okay. All right. I see what you’re saying.
Tom: So if anyone wants to watch along with us, we are going to watch series one, episode two, which is called Say Little Hen. And then we’re going to watch series three, episode five, The Windbreak War, which is one of my absolute favourites.
Abigoliah: All right, let’s do it. I’m excited.
Tom: All right. Welcome back from Surbiton. So, yeah, not quite the existential angst, but you can sort of, I think, see where that comes from. That desire to be the master of your own destiny, which is what drives Tom and Barbara Good.
Abigoliah: I completely forgot about this until we watched the first season. But I grew up in a small town, but I grew up in a neighbourhood, kind of like what suburbia would be, where – so my dad was a doctor. The judge lived across the street.
Tom: Like Andy Hardy.
Abigoliah: Yeah, my GP lived down the road, my dentist lived to the left, everyone had very middle-class jobs and someone I grew up with, as he got older, his dad was a lawyer. He didn’t move out of the home and he got really into, I guess, as you call it…
Tom: Self-sufficiency.
Abigoliah: Self-sufficiency. And he started keeping bees in our neighbourhood. Now our yards are bigger than British yards. But he started to keep bees. And then my family moved out of my hometown, so I rarely see them. But his next-door neighbours, who are still his next-door neighbours, were like, how’s everything going? And he’s like, oh, Mark’s now got chickens in our neighbourhood. And it was driving the next-door neighbours mental. So I’m like, oh, this has happened in my hometown. Like I know people.
Tom: You are Margo.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, Linda’s Margo.
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: But yeah, I was like, oh, my God, I forgot that Mark did that. He went on this whole, like, self-sufficiency thing and started keeping chickens and bees and stuff in his backyard. And it was like, we don’t live in a neighbourhood where you do that. It’s not a farm. Yeah. But so The Good Life, I really liked it. I will say it’s, when we compare it to Fawlty Towers or other things we’ve seen, it’s slower paced at first, so it took me a minute to be like, oh, this isn’t going to be a gag a second and there’s more dialogue that’s setting things up before we get to the laugh. They hold certain shots with a pause that I was kind of surprised. It wasn’t as boom, boom, boom.
Tom: Yeah, this is not Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Abigoliah: Yeah. No, it’s not. And it’s not The Young Ones, and it’s not Fawlty Towers. Fawlty Towers is really slapstick. The second episode that we watched with the windbreak was a little bit more slapstick, but I thought the first one was, like, quite a gentle episode with the chickens. That being said, like I said, Team Margo.
Tom: Margo all the way.
Abigoliah: I think she’s been given, like, the villain role, but she’s the only one living in reality. And yes, was she rude to the working guy who set up the windbreak? Yes, but so were the next-door neighbours. They’re just a bunch of poshos. So they’re all assholes to the working class.
Tom: But Margo and Barbara are quite patronising to him.
Abigoliah: Yes, yes. Also, I think we should do a field trip where we go to Surbiton to see the house. I’ve decided that you and I need to do that. Yeah, okay. Then when they got drunk, first of all, for a moment I was like, what’s happening? Because they mentioned the wine, but you don’t see them drink the wine. They, like, cut that scene. So you just cut to them drunk.
Tom: And it’s set up in an earlier episode. I think it might be the Christmas episode at the end of the second season.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Where they brew the wine for the first time, and there’s a lovely moment when Richard Briers tastes it, and they’re both, like, pulling faces, and he’s like, it’s hurting the back of my eyes. This is set up as this absolutely foul concoction.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: clearly it’s very potent.
Abigoliah: Yes. I did not expect the windbreak episode to, like, devolve into this, like, drunken flirting, wife-swapping thing. It felt very 70s. Like it felt like, oh, was this when, like, wife-swapping was a thing? Like, I was like, I feel like this was really part of the zeitgeist. And when it took that left turn, I didn’t think we were gonna come back to the windbreak. I’m glad we did at the end.
Tom: There’s a bit of cultural specificity here. And again, you must go back and watch that Young Ones episode.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Because the whole world was in love with Felicity Kendal.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Like every straight man in Britain fancied Felicity Kendal. I imagine half the gay ones did as well.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And she was voted Rear of the Year.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: There’s a joke in an episode of Red Dwarf that the spaceship finds a moon shaped like Felicity Kendal’s bottom, and they spend a week orbiting it.
Abigoliah: Wow. Did Felicity Kendal like all this attention?
Tom: I think she was flattered by it. You know, the way you kind of had to be in the mid-1970s. But yeah, so that kind of mutual flirting is kind of the writers giving the male audience members a little bit of wish fulfilment, like they wish they could be in that kitchen with Jerry.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Able to say those things to Felicity Kendal.
Abigoliah: Well, I was thinking with the writers when they wrote that episode. If I was a partner of a writer, the wife of a writer, and if I had a relationship with my next-door neighbour – now I don’t, because I live in London, so I don’t know my neighbours’ names – but if I saw that, I’d be like, is there something we need to talk about?
Tom: But also, I think one of the things you spotted right from the very beginning is how much in particular Tom and Barbara love each other.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And fancy each other. And that wasn’t, like, earth-shattering or groundbreaking, but I think viewers in 75 would have been a little bit like, oh, that’s a new way of depicting a marriage, because it used to be Fawlty Towers. It used to be either strident wives and henpecked husbands, or it would be, like, lotharios, like young men out on the pull with pretty girls around them. But two people who look ordinary.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But who nevertheless really have the hots for each other and show it and are tactile and play silly games with each other. One of the first things you said was, they really love each other. Yeah, and that’s one of the appealing things about this show.
Abigoliah: Because they do this, like, little play-fight together, which is so cute and endearing. And that’s, like, something me and my partner would do. Like, it’s not just a show of, like, hey, we fuck. You know, it’s, it’s like, oh, they really care about each other.
Tom: And they enjoy each other’s company.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t think about that when I said it, but yeah, in the 70s, 60s definitely. But you think of all the sitcoms and it’s always, like, there’s a husband and wife, but they clearly don’t like each other.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Or, like, the husband, it’s always like, oh, darling, you are a bit of an idiot, aren’t you?
Tom: But yeah, in many ways, the archetypal British sitcom formula, we’ll see, I’m sure, countless variations on this, is two people trapped together who can’t stand each other.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And so this is a very light version of that, but I suppose it’s really Tom and Margo who are the ones who are most frequently crossing swords, and they can’t get away from each other. Tom’s committed to this life of self-sufficiency, and Margo clearly isn’t go to up sticks and move just because her neighbours have gone mad. So they’re stuck together. But what sweetens it and leavens it is you actually have two loving relationships on different sides of the back garden fence.
Abigoliah: Yeah, and I liked it when Jerry, like, they started to take the piss out of Margo, and he stood up for his wife. He wasn’t like, oh, she can be catty or, oh, she would do this. He’s like, fuck you.
Tom: Yeah, you’re not being fair.
Abigoliah: Yeah. This isn’t, it’s her side of the fence. She can do this.
Tom: And he gets an exit round for it.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And again, Team Margo, she is right. She is right. And if they can build a freaking farm, she can put up her little windbreak wherever she wants. I really like Margo.
Tom: Now, this ran for four seasons of seven episodes each, and it went out between 1975 and 1977. Very unlike what we were just talking about with these big Apple and Netflix shows. They just banged them out. And the final episode of the fourth series definitely feels like a finale.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But it was followed by a Christmas special. And then, I think we have talked about this on a previous episode, a very bizarre 1978 Royal Command Performance.
Abigoliah: Yes, you mentioned this.
Tom: Where the Queen was filmed turning up to Television Centre to watch a perfectly ordinary episode of The Good Life being recorded. It’s nuts.
Abigoliah: That’s insane. And, like, did they, I mean, they couldn’t because it was just a normal episode. But you’d acknowledge, like, if the Queen showed up to your farcical play, you might be like, we need to write in a line or something.
Tom: It’s an hour-long show as transmitted. So, but 30 minutes is the Queen turning up, the Queen shaking hands with everybody.
Abigoliah: Oh really.
Tom: And then, as if you were sitting in the audience, the floor manager explaining how sitting in a television studio audience works and introducing the cast. And so you see all of that, and then the episode just plays out over 30 minutes, and then there’s five minutes at the end of the Queen driving away. So it’s completely bananas.
Abigoliah: The Queen in her cart.
Tom: Exactly. So, yes.
Abigoliah: So is there still footage? Is all of this available from, like, the Queen showing up, that half hour?
Tom: Yeah, it’s all on the DVD box set.
Abigoliah: Oh, whoa. She probably was like, oh, Charles, it’s like us and you do the homesteading if you could, if you were allowed.
Tom: Philip.
Abigoliah: Oh, no. Sorry, I’m confusing them. Yeah.
Tom: But the point about accents is very well made as well, because in the 70s, that’s just kind of how everybody sounded.
Abigoliah: It took me a minute to, like, lock into their accent. Like, there were moments where I was like, wait, what did they say? Like, it was so posh that I almost couldn’t understand it.
Tom: And that’s what RADA would have taught you in the 70s: how to speak in Received Pronunciation. Yeah, but people these days probably sound more like me. And there are some people who will argue that you can’t really call my accent Received Pronunciation anymore, because I don’t sound like Jerry and Margo. So what I speak is now called Standard Southern British.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But you can, if you listen to recordings of the Queen from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, you can hear her accent morphing. And she doesn’t sound quite as posh as she used to towards the end of her life.
Abigoliah: Yeah, I remember once talking to a professor and OBE award winner. Is that an award? What do you call that?
Tom: An accolade?
Abigoliah: There’s research papers on the Queen’s accent because so many – so my accent has changed since living in the UK.
Tom: Oh, has it become anglicised?
Abigoliah: A bit.
Tom: I can’t hear that.
Abigoliah: No, you can’t.
Tom: Because I hear what’s different from the accent that I’m used to.
Abigoliah: But Tom can tell when I’ve been on the phone with my family and when I’m at home. My family, I once asked my brothers and sisters, I was like, has my accent changed? Because Tom says that he can tell when I’ve, like, visited home or if I’ve talked to them for a while. And my brother’s like, it’s not the way you speak, it’s your intonation. So instead of saying, like, are you going? First of all, my vocabulary has changed. So instead of going, are you going to the shop? I’ll go, are you going to the shop? I kind of put on a British accent there, but certain things like that have changed a bit. But the Queen, people have written papers on it because she’s one of the most isolated people. It’s not like she’s mixing among other people, absorbing the way they speak, absorbing their vocabulary. She’s just kind of, like, you know, locked off from everyone. Yet it’s changed, probably from watching TV. Because if I’ve learned anything from The Crown, they do like their TV.
Tom: Absolutely. And reminds me of the way that Mrs. Thatcher had elocution lessons, I think after she became leader and before she became prime minister.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So she had quite a high voice, and it was thought that it wasn’t commanding enough and it was going to be shrill. So she had elocution lessons to bring it right down here.
Abigoliah: That’s still a thing with women in power. You’re told to lower your voice. Again, there’s studies on that as well. But back to The Good Life. I really liked it. Hold on. Let me just check what…
Tom: I think with this show in particular, one of the things, because so much is about what’s happening in the back garden, there’s always going to be a healthy proportion of 16mm film. And especially in the first episode, look at what some of the actors are doing. So Margo is filmed in the back garden on that location, scraping that shepherd’s pie into the bin, and then has to remember weeks later in front of the studio audience how she was standing, how she was holding, comes in holding what is apparently the same spoon. And these have been filmed weeks apart.
Abigoliah: Oh wow.
Tom: I don’t think you notice that when you’re just sitting and watching it, which is a testament to how carefully that’s all been done. But that was all just part of how television was made.
Abigoliah: Even you said that some of it was filmed outside and some of it was filmed in studio, and I didn’t even clock it this time.
Tom: Really? Even all that stuff on the patio is in the studio on videotape.
Abigoliah: Of course it is. Yeah. And then when they’re in the garden, they’re…
Tom: On…
Abigoliah: Film. They’re on film. Maybe because it was so much film in the start. Like, like with Fawlty Towers, it’s, like, jarring when he goes outside or, I don’t know, because they’re on BBC One, did they have better? I mean, there’s no, like, editing way to make that look more seamless.
Tom: Not in those days. No.
Abigoliah: I can’t explain why, but…
Tom: It’s partly that, I think it’s partly that they were, because they were doing so much film, they had to be really on it when it came to creating that continuity from moment to moment.
Abigoliah: So you’re filming in front of a live studio audience. How much of an episode is in front of the live studio audience, and how much of it…
Tom: Unless there is a pre-filming day, like with Basil the Rat, which there wouldn’t have been on any of these, I don’t think, then anything that’s interior, which also includes stuff on the patio, is shot on videotape in front of an audience. By that stage, they have all the 16mm film in the can, so they play in those film sequences to the audience first, so they can understand the plot, and secondly, so they can record the laughter.
Abigoliah: Yeah, but I feel like if I was, like, oh, I’m gonna go watch a sitcom live, that’s gonna be so exciting. And, like, half of it was watching a video, I’d be really disappointed with that. But that’s just me.
Tom: Well, you know, you haven’t paid for your ticket.
Abigoliah: Yeah, that is true. It’s all free, isn’t it? Okay, tell me what happens next.
Tom: So, as I said, when the show was commissioned, only Richard Briers was a household name. But the show made all of the others stars. And all three of them got leading roles in their own sitcoms subsequently.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So we’ll be seeing Paul Eddington again as MP Jim Hacker when we get to Yes, Minister.
Abigoliah: Fabulous.
Tom: And you asked me about this. Penelope Keith starred opposite Peter Bowles in To the Manor Born, which ran for three years in the late 70s.
Abigoliah: Say that again. Teller manor…
Tom: Born. To the Manor Born.
Abigoliah: Tooth or manor Born?
Tom: To.
Abigoliah: To.
Tom: The.
Abigoliah: The.
Tom: Manor.
Abigoliah: Manor.
Tom: Born.
Abigoliah: It’s a stupid title. I don’t like it.
Tom: And Felicity Kendal starred in Solo and The Mistress, both written by Carla Lane.
Abigoliah: Solo and the Mistress…
Tom: Two shows, one called Solo, one called The Mistress.
Abigoliah: Okay, sorry. I was like, so is it about a pianist just having, like, a…
Tom: But Richard Briers remained at the top of everyone’s wish list for BBC comedy shows. The same writers, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, wrote him another hit with Ever Decreasing Circles, which ran from 1984 to 1989, and he carried on playing leading parts on stage, in films, on television until his death in 2013. Paul Eddington died of cancer in 1995, but Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith are both still alive as of this recording.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. How old are they?
Tom: They’d both be in their 80s.
Abigoliah: Yeah, 80s. Wow. Let’s get them on for our very special interviews. So they all worked through the 70s. Did they work up through the 80s as well?
Tom: Yeah, they were working all the time. They were in huge demand because this show in particular made them such big stars. And they, I think, were just about able to escape complete typecasting. Penelope Keith, early in her career, had been playing much more sort of alpha characters. She’s in another sitcom where she plays this, like, German biker woman, much more sort of commanding, much more Onatopp than Margo. And so people always think of Margo first when they see her, but she was able to play other parts besides. She’s in another sitcom about being a female MP called… I can’t remember what it’s called, where she’s a little bit more down to earth.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But she still has that face and that voice. Yeah. So there’s only so much she can do.
Abigoliah: I mean, when she played the German biker, though, she did do a German…
Tom: She did do a…
Abigoliah: German accent. I love the idea of her being like, guten Tag.
Tom: Yeah, like a lot of people, she’s more versatile than sometimes she’s allowed to be. People see you do that, and they want you to do that again, and only that. And there isn’t a lot else to say. The reason for showing you The Good Life is because it’s very, very typical of a lot of other shows that have been made around the same time. It’s just a particularly good version.
Abigoliah: How did you view it for the first time?
Tom: Because these shows were so popular, they would be endlessly repeated. I wouldn’t have remembered very much of the first run in the mid-70s, when I was only little, but it was repeated throughout the 80s and 90s.
Abigoliah: And it was as beloved?
Tom: Oh, yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: People didn’t moan about, oh, another repeat. They’re like, oh, brilliant. We get to see The Good Life again. We get to see Tom fall off the chair again. That clip, by the way, isn’t quite as famous as, for example, I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order, but it comes up in clip shows a lot.
Abigoliah: Oh, yeah.
Tom: And it’s a beautiful bit of physical comedy.
Abigoliah: So by the time you were old enough to watch The Good Life was also about the time The Young Ones was coming on.
Tom: And hence Vyvyan tearing up the title sequence.
Abigoliah: Of course.
Tom: But then I think it’s the one where I think it’s Vyvyan’s parents have come, and his dad, who’s, I don’t think it’s the same actor, but he’s very much like Andy in the first episode we watched, the boss.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Who is saying, I will not hear of this. Felicity Kendal is sweetly pretty.
Abigoliah: Okay. No, I’ve definitely not seen this one. But you as a viewer, as a young kid, like, you know, as we said, The Young Ones, like, burst through the walls onto British television. And then there’s this, like, sweet, almost romantic comedy of errors of The Good Life. And you would have watched them at the same time. Not one in the 70s and one in the 80s. Did you, was there a thing at school, like, if you were cool, you liked The Young Ones and, like, only lame people like The Good Life?
Tom: Probably. I don’t remember talking to anyone about The Good Life, but yeah, I would be watching that and other shows, including some others that we’re going to watch this season, like Dad’s Army, which are kind of what the BBC was doing around this time. Dad’s Army is a little bit earlier, a touch earlier. But all coming from that same tradition of very British, often quite suburban and not really challenging any norms or preconceptions.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And that makes them comforting watches, but it means that they don’t innovate. They aren’t trying to do something new. They aren’t trying to tear up the rule book. Big contrast to what we watched in our first season. Do you have any predictions? You made one prediction about there being a goat, and that turned out to be absolutely correct. Yeah. Having watched two episodes, what do you think might be premises of future episodes or other things that might occur?
Abigoliah: So were there blackouts in the 70s?
Tom: There were. Yes.
Abigoliah: Cause my thought was, is there an episode where, like, there’s a blackout on the street and Jerry and Margo? Yeah, it’s Jerry and Margo. Have to rely on Tom and Barbara’s homesteading…
Tom: Generator.
Abigoliah: Self-sufficiency life. Their generator to get through the blackout.
Tom: I think there might be. I don’t have a list of all the episodes in front of me, but I’ve got a feeling there is something about that.
Abigoliah: I feel like there’s an episode after so many episodes where Jerry and Margo are exasperated with Tom and Barbara. There has to be an episode where they have to rely…
Tom: There absolutely is.
Abigoliah: Is there a food shortage..?.
Tom: In the Christmas special. Margo…
Abigoliah: Oh! She burns the turkey…
Tom: Not quite. Her Christmas is delivered in a van.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: She takes issue with some of the contents. She sends the whole van back and says, I’m not accepting this until it’s brought back properly. And then, of course, it’s too late and it doesn’t get delivered. And so they have to go to the Goods for Christmas.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It’s a beautiful episode.
Abigoliah: All right.
Tom: If we’re watching three, that would have been the third.
Abigoliah: Okay. And what season does that…
Tom: Two, I think.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: I’d have to double-check that.
Abigoliah: And then they’re eating their grown fruit and their eggs and their…
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah. All right. If there’s not a blackout episode, I was close on the perimeter.
Tom: Very close. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve got the measure of this show. Absolutely. Does it earn a place on the Shelf of Fame?
Abigoliah: You know.
Tom: The Shelf of Fame is getting kind of crowded. There’s two empty slots. We probably will fill it up this season. And then you’ll have to start casting things back into the bargain bin.
Abigoliah: Casting things aside. Here’s the thing. There’s no reason at this point with two spaces still available to be cutthroat. The two shows that I’ve left off the Shelf of Fame were just two shows I didn’t understand. Right. This I understand, and it made me giggle. Now I’m looking at this and I’m like, why did I put Morecambe and Wise there? Oh yeah, that’s why I put Morecambe and Wise there. I think I liked it more than The Young Ones, actually.
Tom: Oh, okay.
Abigoliah: But did I? Let’s say yes. Let’s say yes. And put The Good Life at number seven, which takes The Young Ones to number eight, and The Morecambe and Wise Show to number nine. Let’s do that. And I think what I’m learning is I like more gentle comedy.
Tom: Is that a surprise to you?
Abigoliah: Yeah, it is, because I don’t think I am that person.
Tom: But we’ve got a real mix this season of some very gentle stuff. At least one other show, which is about as gentle as The Good Life. And we’ve also got, in fact, coming up next, something which is much more punk, much more high energy, much more bright colours and high gag rate.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, why don’t you tell the listeners what we’re going to be watching next?
Tom: So next time we are going to be watching Absolutely Fabulous.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: The show created by Jennifer Saunders, who wrote all the episodes, starred in it and assembled an amazing cast around her. So we’re going to watch series one, episode four, and then we’re going to watch series five, episode three, if anyone wants to watch along with us.
Abigoliah: Awesome. Well, guys, thank you so much for listening to All British Comedy Explained. If you liked it, there’s several ways to support this show. One, keep listening. Two, tell a friend about it. Or go to your podcatcher app and leave us a five-star review. It helps other people find the podcast. Or you can sign up for our Patreon that we’ve just started for this season. At £3 a month, you get uninterrupted ad-free listening of the podcast. At £5 a month, you get ad-free listening to the main episodes as well as special mini bonus episodes. And can you remind the audience what our mini episode will be this week?
Tom: Yes, we’re going to tackle the question: is self-sufficiency the pipeline to reform? Which we also mean is homesteading the gateway drug to MAGA?
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. So we’ll be tackling that in the Patreon. So please check it out, £3 or £5 for the mini episodes. And until next time, guys, I have been Abigoliah.
Tom: I’ve been…
Abigoliah: Tom, thank you so much. Goodbye.
Tom: Cheerio.