Another search around YouTube landed me with another Christmas TV special this time ‘The Good Life’ Before going on and telling you about the enjoyable 30 minutes or so watching this Christmas special there is a ‘crush alert’. No its not Barbara, Felicity Kendal, who many may expect but Margo, Penelope Keith, a iceberg I would have loved to melt. I just had the feeling she was a right naughty sort if you could get through her armour-plated skin.
Tom and Barbara Good are successful at self-sufficiency and have only spent 15p on balloons while next door the Leadbetters Margo and Jerry have their Christmas delivered at a cost unknown. The Goods however jokingly throw out a figure of £50,000.
When Christmas comes to the Goods, for instance, they kill a chicken from the coop, dig up the veg from the garden, make decorations out of newspaper, crackers out of toilet roll tubes and have a two foot tree because that was donated by the greengrocer after it snapped off the top of a larger tree. It’s played for laughs but, as you watch, you realise just how daft many of our festive traditions are, and how meaningless if not imbued with the right spirit.
Next door, Margo is lambasting the delivery driver of her Christmas order over an eight foot six rather than nine-foot tree she ordered. She enlists the help of Tom and Barbara to measure the tree to make her point to the delivery driver played by David Battley, a gormless looking man who likes to make quiet observations. When Barbara asks him, what he has observed about her, utterly deadpan, he says that she ‘has the type of eyes that men kill for. Eyes that reveal a deeply sexual nature’. Barbara is delighted, and he liked Margo’s shoes.
When moody Margo orders her order to be taken back because of the ‘faulty’ tree and all the other attendant trappings (food, drink, present’s, decorations) away until they can get the order right. We all know what happens next she as sowing the seeds of ruining her Christmas.
Christmas morning we find Margo phoning one of her expected guests informing her Jerry had chicken pox much to the surprise of Jerry standing there. No tree or Christmas cheer for the Leadbetters. Would the Goods at the patio door singing carols then busting in wishing them Happy Christmas, what Christmas, who delivers on Christmas Day.
The Goods offer to share their meagre Christmas with their neighbours. At first it’s hard going, Margo can’t loosen up and just enjoy herself. When she pulls a cracker she can’t say ‘bang’ (the crackers don’t have their own bangs), and refuses to wear a paper hat made out of 'The Daily Mirror' and insists on one fashioned from 'The Telegraph'. Taking her aside, Tom says that she’ll have to go home if she can’t enjoy herself and Margo makes the tragic admission ‘I don’t know how to’. A quick pep talk from Tom, and some mild sexual harassment and she soon readily throws herself into the action.
After some raucous games and a few glasses of pea pod burgundy, it is clear when Margo is free of social convention and all the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses, this has been the ‘best Xmas ever’, and Jerry has enjoyed it too, particularly when Barbara was rubbing a balloon against his crotch.
The Goods present the Leadbetter’s with their gifts, sickly green jumpers made on their loom. Going to get their present for the Goods, Tom and Barbara speculate on what expensive impracticalities Margo and Jerry may have wasted their money on. A briefcase for Tom to take to the allotment, or a silver Georgian trowel. Only to be amazed to hear a loud moo and Margo leading a gift-wrapped cow into the kitchen. Far more useful than a big green tank top it is the gift that, if milked correctly, keeps on giving.
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