The Good Life
On his 40th birthday, Tom Good is no longer able to take his job seriously and gives up work as a draughtsman for a company that makes plastic toys for breakfast cereal packets. Their house is paid for so he and his wife Barbara adopt a sustainable, simple and self-sufficient lifestyle while staying in their home in The Avenue, Surbiton. They turn their front and back gardens into allotments, growing soft fruit and vegetables. They introduce chickens, pigs (Pinky and Perky), a goat (Geraldine) and a cockerel (Lenin). They generate their own electricity, using methane from animal waste, and attempt to make their own clothes. They sell or barter surplus crops for essentials they cannot make themselves. They cut their monetary requirements to the minimum with varying success.
Their actions horrify their kindly but conventional neighbours, Margo and Jerry Leadbetter. Margo and Jerry were intended to be minor characters, but their relationship with one another and the Goods became an essential element. Under the influence of the Goods' homemade wine, called "peapod burgundy" (the strength of which becomes a running joke), their intermingled attractions for one another become apparent. Both couples are childless.
murder