Digging up 20 facts about The Good Life

...as a retrospective comes to U&Gold

Next week U&Gold airs The Good Life: Inside Out, making 50 years of the sitcom about a couple who quit the rat race to become self-sufficient in their suburban home. Here are 20 bits of trivia about the series:

1 Peter Bowles was the original choice for Jerry but turned it down to appear in the play Absent Friends. Richard Briers was in the same production and told Bowles that because The Good Life recorded on a Sunday, their day off from the play, he could’ve done both jobs, as he proved…

2. Hannah Gordon was offered the role of Barbara before Felicity Kendal but felt it was too similar to the character she played in My Wife Next Door, a BBC sitcom from a few years earlier.

3 Exteriors for The Avenue, where the characters lived, were filmed on Kewferry Road in Northwood, north-west London, chosen for its proximity to BBC TV Centre. Residents Michael and Margaret Mullins had their garden transformed into the Goods’ chaotic vegetable patch, which was restored between series. Albert Carr lived in the Leadbetter house during the first series, followed by John and Betty Tindall. Homeowners were reportedly paid £50 per episode – around £500 today.

4 Alan Bennett was offered the role of the bank manager in the final episode, When I’m 65, which was recorded in the presence of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. He declined by postcard, and George Cole played the role, a year before he began his most famous role as Arthur Daley in Minder.

5 The original reason the writers had for Tom to quit his job was to spend his time restoring an old yacht, with a dream of sailing around the world.

6 Goldie the Blue Peter dog peed on the studio floor just hours before the Queen was due to arrive to watch the royal command performance of the final episode being recorded.

7 Live coverage of Hungary V France in the 1978 World Cup was cut short so that performance could start on time.

8 The theme tune was composed by Burt Rhodes, who scored and orchestrated the first James Bond film Dr No in 1962, and was later musical director on The Benny Hill Show.

9 Broadcaster and super fan Samira Ahmed had a Good Life themed 40th birthday party and invited guests to come in fancy dress as the characters. Samira went as Margo, complete with a turban.

10 Margo does not appear on screen in the first episode; she is only heard as a voice over in the last scene. Penelope Keith is still listed in the credits.

11 The Goods’ roster of animals named on screen were Pinky and Perky the pigs, Lenin the cockerel, Geraldine the goat, Olivia the chicken, Glenda the hen, Brian the horse, and Margo the goat.

12 In the scene where Lenin the cockerel escapes and boards a bus in the episode Our Speaker Today, some hens and a sprinkling of chicken feed were put in the vehicle to lure the animal inside.

13 The animated opening sequence of the bird flying around a yellow sun that turned into a flower was created by graphic designer Oliver Elmes. It was inspired by a 1953 American cartoon called A Unicorn In The Garden, in which a bird flew upside down.

14 The show was retitled Good Neighbors when it was broadcast in the USA, to avoid confusion with an American sitcom also called The Good Life, with no connection to the British show, which ran for one series in 1971 and starred a pre-Dallas Larry Hagman.

15 A spin-off starring Margo and Jerry was planned by the BBC after The Good Life’s final episode, but the idea was rejected by Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington.

16 Tom’s customised cart which he and Barbara use as a mode of transportation was made from an old miniature tractor and a park bench, with various bits of machinery stuck on to complete the look of a makeshift vehicle. Tony Oxley from the BBC’s special effects department created it, adding smoke and bangs where necessary.

Good_Life tractor

17 As Tom and Barbara couldn’t afford new clothes, the majority of the show’s costume budget was spent on Margo’s lavish wardrobe. Most of the items were brought from Harrods and Selfridges, with the head of costume determined to use up the allocated budget for each series in case it was cut the following year.

18 In the 1990s writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey met with producers in Hollywood to discuss a US remake, who asked if the self-sufficiency element could be dropped and Tom quit his job to become a watchmaker instead. The idea was rejected…

19 The Windbreak War’s famous scene where the four leads get drunk was originally only meant to have Tom and Jerry inebriated. Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal suggested Margo and Barbara also get tipsy, and after initial resistance from the BBC about showing women getting drunk on screen the script was rewritten just days before the recording.