TheDudeAbides
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Joined: 15/1/2006
From: In the neighbourhood, feeling a bit daffy.
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25) Penelope Keith as Margo Leadbetter
The Good Life, 1975-1978
I've loved The Good Life ever since my grandparents would come over and babysit us and stick on UK Gold all night. Unlike many other programs they love from that era which I find incredibly mirthless (I'm looking at you, Keeping Up Appearances...we fucking get it, she's a social climber.), The Good Life holds up marvellously as clever, witty and most of all just fun in a peculiarly British way. In fact, the episode title 'Silly, But It's Fun' could more or less sum up the attitude of the whole show, which pits the easygoing, irreverent and even a bit childish Tom and Barbara against their straight-laced, firmly bourgeois neighbours, Margo and Jerry.
Okay, so why does it work? If course, the writing played a tremendous part it its success - the scripts were ahead of their time, even edgy, in their sharp observation of surburbia and an approach to sex that wasn't Carry On-style snickering double entendre but instead was ...well, sexy. But more than anything else, it was the magnificent chemistry between the cast that lifted in into the pantheon of great sitcoms. First, Richard Briers, who manages to play the only 'endearing manchild' role I have ever found remotely endearing (Zach Galifianakis take note), mostly because he knows exactly how to pull out those Shakespearean acting chops when needed. His innate silliness and impatience with convention make him a great comic character, but then suddenly you get something like the end of 'The Last Posh Frock' which ranks as one of my top lump-in-the-throat moments. Then, Felicity Kendal who yes, did look good in dungarees, we get it, but she was also a wonderful character. Like Mary Tyler Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show, she quickly evolved from straight-man for her screen husband into a comidienne in her own right, in addition to having heartstopping chemistry with Briers. Paul Eddington is probably one of the most immediately likeable faces in the history of television - there's just something about him that means you can tangibly feel the audience's affection for Jerry. His occasional wistfulness for Tom's lifestyle and, indeed, Tom's wife, make him more than just a conservative counterpoint to the Goods' free-spirits. In fact, Jerry spends so much time mediating and advising the other characters that he's probably the nicest as well as the sanest member of the quartert.
But Penelope Keith. Ah. She really is a cut above when it comes to comedy. Unlike any other sitcom character, I know that every line that comes out of Margo's mouth will make me laugh. Of course, the writers gave her some superb material, but her performance was strong enough to get belly laughs with anything. Margo's snobbery is often outrageous in its Victorian brutality (laying out newpaper for the tradesman to stand on. In fact, referring to people as 'tradesmen' at all.) and yet she never strays outside the realm of believability. The character is crafted with such fondness and good-humour that her true-blue Conservatism and ruthless committment to respectability aren't mocked but are rather portrayed as signs of her innate goodness, which she has chosen to express through striving to achieve the bourgeois idyll she honestly believes in. Keith conveys the sincerity of Margo's convictions so marvellously that their more ludicrous manifestations don't undermine the believability of the character. Whether or not you share her ideals, its hard not to fall under the spell of her gloriously imperious attitude towards everyone who crosses her path, be it a car mechanic, a shopkeeper or her own husband.
Of course, there is such more to Margo than simply stuffiness, as we gradually begin to realise as the series goes on. 'The Windbreak War' and 'Silly, But It's Fun' show that rather than being an oblivious source of laughter (see: lolcow), Margo is acutely self-aware and in fact almost a prisoner of her own narrow-mindedness. When she drunkenly confides to Tom that she knows she is 'starchy' and that everyone laughs at her just as they did at school, Keith goes right for the jungular and plays it beautifully straight, leaving Briers to carry the comic burden for a few minutes. When, at the very end, Margo finally gets it for once, her spontaneous peal of laughter is infectious - such is the sympathy Keith has managed to create for what could have easily (and lazily) been played as a monstrous, flat stereotype. It's not even that there is really a joke - you are simply laughing because she is.
Also, on a side note: after my recent television appearance, my apparent resemblence to Margo Leadbetter was remarked upon on Twitter.
< Message edited by TheDudeAbides -- 3/9/2011 6:56:44 PM >
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