November 5, 2010: A new TV series will start on BBC2 on Monday (Nov 8) to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the popular sitcom The Good Life.
In Giles and Sue Live the Good Life, at 9pm, writer Giles Coren and comedian Sue Perkins step back to 1975 to try to learn some self-sufficient skills and techniques.Although not living the life round the clock, the duo throw themselves in to recreating a distinctly Tom and Barbara lifestyle. Over the three part series, they learn some of the skills and techniques in order to find out what it takes to make the dream a reality. Based in an ordinary suburban street, and inspired by archive clips of the comedy, during the series Giles and Sue try to recreate the Good’s world – from growing vegetables in the garden and grazing goats in the local park, to attempting to generate alternative energy supplies. They’ll seek advice from experts when needed, but most of the time they’ll try to find their own answers to everything, from carrot blight to how to treat a nasty outbreak of chicken mite. Programme one sees the arrival of four excitable chickens and two frisky goats which cause a problem for Giles. In the meantime there are seeds to sow and, with the help of experts, there are crash courses in milking, bread making and seeing whether they can even manage to produce their own goat’s cheese. But, as the series progresses, it won’t all be wellies and manure. Just as Margo and Jerry’s affluent consumerism provided the perfect foil to their neighbour’s earnest experiment in self sufficiency, Sue and Giles get the opportunity to try out a more mainstream 1970s lifestyle in an attempt to understand just what the Goods were kicking back against.
