Comedy
Tom and Barbara Good escape the rat race and pursue a self-sufficient lifestyle in Surbiton, much to the concern, frustration and sometimes envy of their neighbours Margo and Jerry Leadbetter. Entitled ‘Good Neighbors’ when shown in the USA.
Top-rated
Fri,
04 Apr, 1975
S1.E1Plough Your Own Furrow
After he has celebrated his 40th birthday Tom decides that he is unhappy with his life style so he packs his job in, farms his large garden and becomes self sufficient.
Top-rated
Fri,
11 Apr, 1975
S1.E2Say Little Hen ...
The Goods install the first chickens in their chicken coop, but they prove slow to lay their first eggs. Incensed by the condescension of the Leadbetters when they are invited to dinner together with Tom's former boss & his wife, the Goods decide to sacrifice one of the chickens to make a show of their not being as poor as the Leadbetters think.
Richard Briers
Tom Good
Felicity Kendal
Barbara Good
Paul Eddington
Jerry Leadbetter
Penelope Keith
Margo Leadbetter
User reviews2
Review
Featured review
I wonder just how many people in the mid 1970s - anywhere in the world - would have realised just how visionary writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey were with this marvellous tale of a happily married suburban couple who decide to give up their daily grind and revert to a subsistence existence. Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall are great in the roles of the optimistic and naive "Tom" and his stoic and determined wife "Barbara" as they scrap, save, cannibalise, economise and basically do just about anything to avoid needing/earning/spending money - not an easy task. For me, the best parts come from their loyal and wealthy neighbours "Jerry" (Paul Eddington) and "Margo" (Penelope Keith). The former, the long suffering husband to the loving but terribly snobbish wife who looks down with a mix of disbelief and disdain on the newly self-sufficient folks next door. It features hilarious scenarios that take the most basic of themes - heating oil, vegetable patches, making your own clothes or cheese or wine and turns them into genuine laugh out loud comedy. It is simple and hugely effective, the humour working on many levels as the underpinning principles of love, loyalty and obstinacy marry well with sheer bloody mindedness and, on occasion, downright stupidity - but not just from the same side of their garden fence each time. It probably helps, as with the contemporaneous "Fawlty Towers" series that there was a very limited run. It clearly has an environmentalist aspect to the narrative, but it not delivered in the preachy, puritanical fashion that is so often the style used now - it successfully uses humour as a conduit for a message that is both potent and, frequently, laugh out loud. The writers don't flog the heart out of the joke, and the characters are given plenty of space to develop and shine. Great stuff well worth a watch.
Geronimo196723 Feb, 2022
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