Is it really 35 years since The Good Life? Or rather, is it only 35 years?
We still marvel at the uncanny pertness of Felicity Kendal’s bum on Strictly and now Sue Perkins and Giles Coren, the foot and mouth of reality broadcasting, are going Back To The Good Life (BBC Two, Monday 9pm) to warm over the sitcom’s corpse in a half-hearted stab at feeding themselves.
Coren and Perkins are an Odd Couple indeed - whoever thought a lesbian and a twat was a match made in heaven? And, mistaking ‘self-sufficient’ for ‘self-satisfied’, they opened by saying that “of course” they wouldn’t be living the Good Life full-time, more playing dress-up in a “modest 80-foot garden” with the odd misty-eyed reference to Dutch elm disease thrown in.
Perkins’ hands-on earthiness made her the more convincing Richard Briers figure, even if her tittering about vegetable variants like Early Horn and Gardener’s Shaft was more up Kendal’s alley. It might have been funny from almost anyone else, but Perkins can kill a joke just by looking at it, like General Zod in Superman II.
Coren was more of a Margot, the shrill harridan whose only joy was slating her neighbours’ labours. Mind you, that’s a bit weird for those of us who always suspected Margot was privately more of a goer than Barbara. (Jerry stayed with her for some reason, after all.)
There were nuggets of accidental usefulness, like info about home chicken coops, why goats smell bad and the fact foxes outnumber Londoners by 17 to one.
So a genuine show on self-sufficiency would be welcome, even if the first thing it would suggest is ditching the flatscreen TV. But this was a show about a show on self-sufficiency, and a rather dull one.
The original endured through its sincerity: the leads were likeable folk who believed in their mission. This reimagining was ill-served by the lazy snark of Perkins and Coren, who presumed from the start that providing for yourself could only be a vanity project for right-on pillocks.
In fact, their patronising attitude was a good advert for fleeing the cities completely and going to live in a bog.
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