When the writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey came up with the idea for The Good Life, they were looking for a vehicle for Richard Briers, who’d just turned 40. He was well established but not quite famous — the other three actors even less so. Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith were cast on the strength of their performances in an Ayckbourn play. Paul Eddington was a ‘first eleven light-comedy actor’ (as Briers put it) but he was hardly a household name. In the opening credits, Briers’s name was above the title, the other three were below it. Briers’s Tom Good was the lead; Kendal was ensured a decent role as his wife, Barbara, but Jerry and Margo Leadbetter were initially conceived as supporting characters. However, Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith were so good that after the first few episodes, Briers implored Esmonde and Larbey to write them up. The two writers needed no prompting. The Good Life became a quartet — a comedy of manners with a surprising political subtext.
The Good Life was supposed to be about suburban self-sufficiency, but the series soon became a mirror for the fears and aspirations of the age. When the first episode went out, in April 1975, Margaret Thatcher had just become Tory leader, and as Penelope Keith’s Margo emerged as a comic counterweight to Richard Briers’s Tom, her character began to sound uncannily like Mrs T. ‘I am not a citizen, I am a resident,’ she declared. ‘I am the silent majority.’ It could (and probably should) have been a Conservative rallying cry.
This was an entirely unconscious process (The Good Life was never sullied by overt satire), but as a house-proud Boudicea who wasn’t scared to speak her mind or knock her neighbours’ heads together, Margo was both heroic and ridiculous — Mrs T writ small.
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