While I don’t think I ever saw an episode of the British sitcom The Good Life, I’ve read a fair bit about it in passing, as it is one of the mass media touchstones used by Dominic Sandbrook in his series of hefty tomes about British life from the 60s onwards. In short, a middle-aged couple bail on their middle-class lives and try to set up a self-sufficient lifestyle on their (fully paid-off) house in the suburbs. The interaction between the couple and their still-living-the-middle-class-life next-door neighbours provides much of the humour for the show. Based on that, I must heartily agree with David Thompson’s explanation of the show:
… Tom and Barbara’s experiment in “self-sufficiency” wasn’t particularly self-sufficient. They don’t prevail in the end, not on their own terms or in accord with their stated principles, and their inability to do so is the primary source of story lines. Practically every week the couple’s survival is dependent on the neighbours’ car, the neighbours’ chequebook, the neighbours’ unpaid labour, a convoluted favour of some kind. And of course they’re dependent on the “petty” bourgeois social infrastructure maintained by all those people who haven’t adopted a similarly perilous ‘ecological’ lifestyle. The Goods’ “non-greedy alternative” to bourgeois life is only remotely possible because of their own previous bourgeois habits — a paid-off mortgage, a comfortable low-crime neighbourhood with lots of nearby greenery, and well-heeled neighbours who are forever on tap when crises loom, i.e., weekly.
To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is therefore unconvincing, to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours — the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag throughout. And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas, bad choices and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends. If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.
