Neither of the couples in The Good Life have children. This is an essential point for understanding both the absurdity of their housing situation, and how hints of wife-swapping start to creep into the story. But one should note, too, that not having children does not mean not having dependents. The Goods, after all, have their animals. The Leadbetters have the Goods.
When I decided to rewatch The Good Life a few months back, it was because I wanted something comforting to distract me from a world that was, unavoidably, getting worse. This show offers familiar characters in cosy stories about weaving or pottery; it features chickens and pigs and Geraldine the goat. So huge was this programme during its original run that its four seasons were made and broadcast in a little over two years, from April 1975 to May 1977, and it was said to be the Queen’s favourite show. (The final episode, from 1978, is a Royal Command performance, extended to 40 minutes, so you get to see Her Maj and her husband arrive and meet the cast.) So apparently unthreatening is the comedy on offer that, on The Young Ones a few years later, Vivian the punk (Ade Edmonson) tore its opening titles to shreds (“I HATE IT! IT’S SO BLOODY NICE!”).
I felt, too, that I was familiar with the world and the set up of the show, drawn from the repeat season I’d seen back in the 90s, then endlessly rewatched on a series of scratchy off-air VHS tapes. As a teenager – at a stage in life at which I was frequently an ingrate and an irritation to those on whose generosity I depended to live – I read Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall) as the heroes. It is, after all, in the name.
The Leadbetters, meanwhile, were their antagonists, despising their neighbours’ attempts at self-sufficiency and thus standing in opposition to the very premise of the show. Wouldn’t life be easier, Jerry (Paul Eddington) whispers like a suburban Mephistopheles, if you came back to the office and accepted your lot designing toys for breakfast cereals and sucking up to the ghastly “Sir”? His snobbish and judgemental wife Margot (Penelope Keith) was even worse. In one episode, she is so upset by the Goods’ pigs wrecking her garden – not angry, just disappointed – that she demands they get rid of them. They’re sent to the abattoir. The Leadbetters, in my recollection, were monsters.
Imagine my surprise, then, to realise that – from the perspective of middle age, in a world on fire – this recollection was almost entirely wrong. The real heroes are the Leadbetters, who display almost superhuman levels of tolerance and understanding as the Goods bring down the neighbourhood and make their street smell of actual, literal shit. The real monster is Tom Good, a man who inflicts his midlife crisis not merely on his wife, but on everyone else they know.
Barbara is little better: though she puts Tom in his place, and occasionally mourns her lost femininity, she’s as enthused about this self-centred and parasitical life choice as her husband, and more than once berates him because she thinks he’s selling out. She’s written by two men, of course. A decade younger than her husband, though no one seems to mention it, she’s a wish fulfillment in patched-up dungarees. If you hate Tom and think Barbara’s okay, though, I’m sorry to break it to you that she is not. It’s just that you fancy her more.
For all their political and cultural conservatism, meanwhile, the Leadbetters as the very embodiment of noblesse oblige: supporting their friends through what they clearly believe is a breakdown, ferrying them and their animals around the place without asking for contributions towards the petrol or the cleaning bill. They invite them to dinner. They give them cold hard cash.
And are the Goods grateful for this assistance? Do they appreciate their luck? They do not. In one early episode, Jerry looks after their house for a few hours, and the boiler breaks down. When Tom returns – from another trip in Jerry’s borrowed car – he shouts at him. Later on, when the Goods are feeling down, Margot’s instinctive response is to demand her husband fetch his cheque book. When told the problem isn’t money, but exhaustion and despair, she suggests they take a holiday and promises to look after their animals. By way of response, the Goods laugh at her. They are always laughing at her.
The show, at least, is aware of all this, even if my 14-year-old self was not. Jerry, a corporate drone whose only ambition is to succeed Sir, is written to be so decent and so nice that it’d be a bit much in an 18th century epistolary novel. Tom, by contrast, finds himself frequently cut down to size; Briers himself disliked the character, and described him as “a very selfish person”.
But there’s a whole other reason The Good Life is no longer the comforting warm bath that I’d hoped. The trigger for the Goods’ desire to opt for this odd lifestyle choice is the crisis brought on by Tom turning 40, and wondering what it’s all for. Bad enough I’m now older than that; worse that he has the room to do this, because he’s paid off the mortgage on his house.
From the perspective of 2025, that makes it as much a work of sci-fi as its near contemporary Blake’s 7. (The show about pantomime fascism is surely the more relevant choice today.) Few middling 40-year-olds these days are rattling around their houses with endless rooms they don’t need, battling ennui because they’ve paid off their mortgages. In that final royal command performance, Tom, worrying about his retirement, visits a bank to ask for a pension of couple of thousand a year in exchange for his house on his death, casually inventing equity release in the process; the bank manager (a pre-Arthur Daley George Cole) laughs him out of the room. Someone should have told him that the four bed house that played the Goods’ home would one day be valued at well over a million pounds.
There are more ways the show feels like a glimpse of a lost world. The female characters are ostensibly in their 30s, an age at which a sizeable proportion of Londoners of their class and gender today are fretting about their careers, listening to Brat and idly wondering whether it’s time to give up dance drugs. Yet neither worked until Barbara decided to explore a thrilling new opportunity as a peasant, and their role in life seems to be entirely as support to their menfolk. Margot may busy herself with the internal politics of Mrs Dooms-Patterson’s music society or the local Conservative Association, but her real job is to run a house and to entertain unseen foreign businessmen on behalf of Jerry and Sir. Not officially on company payroll, she is nonetheless expected to pull her weight; at one point, when she declines, Jerry is – temporarily – fired. The Good Life’s Surbiton may be recognisable today, but it is not merely in time that it’s halfway to Downton Abbey.
Surbiton is a key part of the show’s set up – transfer it to the country, and the whole premise collapses –yet more than one person has told me that they hadn’t realised it was a real place. It isn’t actually Surbiton we see on screen, as the exterior shots were filmed 15 miles north, in Northwood, a fancy Metroland suburb whose very plushness I’ve always suspected of being why it gave its name to the place all the rough kids come from in The In-Betweeners. Yet this Surbiton is real nonetheless, and like Northwood it only exists because of a train. The London to Southampton line first passed through this part of Surrey in 1838. To avoid upsetting the residents of well-to-do Kingston-Upon-Thames, though, the route was diverted through a village some way to the south. In its first incarnation, Surbiton station was known as “Kingston-Upon-Railway”.
As with whole swathes of Surrey and Middlesex, Essex and Kent, though, a few decades in this location on a railway line a dozen miles from central London made it an ideal place to build new, more spacious housing for the city’s workers. Jerry, bafflingly, commutes by car – in the running joke of his complaints of the traffic on London Bridge, he never seems to realise either that he’s part of the problem, or that there’s another way – but nonetheless the world of The Good Life is the world built by the railway.
The Goods’ self-sufficiency, in other words, is underwritten by three things: interwar housing policy, the benign economic environment of the post-war consensus, and the patience and generosity of their friends. Two of those things are long gone, and the Goods don’t appreciate any of them. “We’re self sufficient and you were hoping you might help us out,” Tom tells a guest character in one episode. “Those two statements don’t really go together, do they,” she replies.
Incidentally, Margot doesn’t know that she is sending those pigs to the abattoir. She doesn’t realise, and when she finds out, she is horrified. I’ll let you guess who really signs their death warrant.
