The meaning of the good life

The actor Richard Briers, who passed away last month, will continue to walk the boards in the theatre of collective memory in one role more than any other.  From 1975 to 1978, over four series of the BBC sitcom The Good Life, Briers played Tom Good, affable advocate of self-sufficiency. The very phrase is still apt to conjure up images of Briers and co-star Felicity Kendal in the role of his wife Barbara, clad in bulky home-knit jumpers, tending to their vegetable patches and incongruous animals in their suburban garden. But the show ended thirty five years ago, and the passing of the actor whose creation so symbolised a green alternative has led me to ask what ‘the good life’ meant back then and whether there are contemporary Goods still searching for it in modern terms.

Sitcoms, like suburban cabbages, have roots, and The Good Life was good natured fun-poking at cultural trends of the time. As the series begins, Tom is turning forty; he is gripped by ennui brought about by his workaday life designing the inherently superfluous plastic toys found in cereal boxes. His solution is to ditch the soulless job and engage in more ennobling pursuits: home growing, home brewing and general self-sufficient home improvement. He is even a pioneer of anaerobic digestion (AD), generating electricity from the dung produced by his goat. He is driven by the belief that well-being and meaning are best created by the hard work of one’s own hands. Thousands of Brits seemed to agree – in 1975, the National Allotment Society saw membership jump by 8,230.

Good books

A clear and at the time immensely popular articulation of the ideology behind the desire to escape the rat-race was economist E.F Schumacher’s 1973 collection of essays Small Is Beautiful: A Study Of Economics As If People Mattered. Schumacher asserted that “since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption,” which serves as a concise expression of the Goods’ manifesto. His interweaving of the concepts of sustainability and quality of life was so thorough that they continue to be entwined in the minds of those seeking an alternative to consumerism.

The popularity of Schumacher’s economic and philosophical work grew amidst a fertile cultural landscape which produced a crop of other publications, perhaps the best remembered of which is John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. Published in 1976, in the middle of The Good Life’s run, Seymour’s introduction enthuses about the sense of self-worth and satisfaction to be derived from growing one’s own healthy, organic food and engaging in varied, hard work.  This amounted to a reasonably sized hill of organic beans in certain city homes of the late 70s, with many disciples converting flower beds to vegetable patches, and some fleeing to the country in pursuit of what Seymour called “the good life in pleasant surroundings”.

Fast forwarding the VCR of time, it is clear that this trend abated at some point: we do not now all own our own smallholdings and small scale AD plants. Home growing has never returned to its Second World War peak, when rationing and the Dig For Victory campaign saw 10% of the nation’s food coming from allotments and home gardens. If consumption patterns have not been revolutionised since the 1970s, is the spirit of self-sufficiency still moving amongst us?

A good life – Richard Briers, who died last month, is remembered for his role as Tom Good. Photo by The Yeti, via Wikimedia Commons

The cultural response in the 70s was perhaps partially based in these 20- to 40-somethings’ nostalgia for their post war childhood, when home growing was common; perhaps coloured by the 1960s counterculture that made available the conceptual space in which people could decide to drop out of “normal” society. Looking at how life had suburbanised around them they felt there was something missing, that they had been torn from their land like so many intensively farmed potatoes, and that this dislocation could be overcome by a return to a more natural, subsistence lifestyle. The good life was a simple one because life had been, in the process of complication, spoilt; its aim was to bring wholeness to fractured identities.

Good examples

In the forty years since, the issues have changed, and so has behaviour. Economics and self-realisation were brought together in 1973 by Schumacher, but environmentalism is now much more firmly part of the public consciousness, and many of those dissatisfied with modern life and its consumption patterns aim more to save the planet rather than to transform themselves. As a result we see more people participating in different aspects of sustainable living, while remaining in other ways firmly entrenched in mainstream culture.

Allotment growing remains immensely popular, with demand outstripping supply. A 2011 study undertaken by Transition Town West Kirby in conjunction with the National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners surveyed English principal authorities regarding allotment waiting lists. They reported that were a total of 152,442 allotments plots in England with a waiting list of 86,787 people, an average of 57 people waiting for every 100 plots. However, while plenty of people want to cut costs or food miles by growing some of their own food, few are aiming for Tom and Barbara’s level of personal self-sufficiency.

The spirit of doing it, doing it together and doing it for yourself is, however, still finding expression. An example local to Eunomia’s Bristol head office is The Yard, a former scaffolding yard transformed by a community group into a colourful self-built eco home development, neighbouring the St Werburgh’s city farm. There is a sense of pride and achievement amongst its self-build residents that Tom Good would surely sympathise with, although aside from their housing choice, many live well within the mainstream.

There are still significant advocates of self-sufficiency, but many are now looking to work at the community rather than the domestic scale. Already mentioned in passing, the Transition Movement is a global initiative seeking to facilitate a transition away from a carbon intensive, high energy culture towards more self-sufficient and resilient communities. There are now over 200 official Transition initiatives across the UK. A foundational belief of the Transition Movement is that ultimately this change is inevitable, due to dwindling oil supplies and the threat of climate change. It explicitly recognises that Transition is an experiment but emphasises that it is a necessary one, in the belief that governments will at best provide too little too late. Given the scale of the issues it seeks to address, the solution cannot come from Tom Good-style personal revolutions. The ethos of Transition is that “…if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time”.  At the same time, it espouses the belief that if we act as communities, toiling together, we will be happier.

The wider adoption of elements of sustainability opens up some inspiring possibilities simply not available in the 1970s. If you are unhappy with consumer society you now have the opportunity of joining a large number of like-minded people to do something about it together. A modern Tom Good need not find himself the subject of ridicule in suburban Surbiton, and choosing to participate is now too commonplace to make the subject matter for a sitcom. Through initiatives like Transition, The Yard and even the humble allotment, elements of The Good Life are alive and well – and rather less lonely.