Dame Penelope united the kingdom in a way we can’t conceive of today
The late actress had a unique gift for making poshness both absurd and loveable, whatever walk of life you were from
It will be hard for younger readers to comprehend how big a star Penelope Keith, who has died at 86, was in the 1970s and Eighties.
Her initial success came as part of the ensemble of sitcom The Good Life(1975-78), intended as a vehicle for Richard Briers. Television comedy, as anybody who’s written it will tell you, is only as good as the actors who perform it. You can hand over an immaculate script, but without the right actors it’s just some typing. This is why most sitcoms, then and now, fail. The Good Life got it spectacularly right, thanks to the same kind of benevolent deity of fortune that assembled the Beatles (and the input of writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, who had spotted both Keith and Felicity Kendal on stage in Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests).
Keith played Margo Leadbetter – the Goods’ neighbour alongside her senior-management-type husband, Jerry (Paul Eddington) – with a highly sceptical attitude about their proto-Green lifestyle (raising livestock in the back garden of their suburban semi, growing their own produce, and so on). “This sort of thing simply does not go on in Surbiton,” she declaims at the sight of the Goods’ pigsty. On paper, it’s just a good line. Keith somehow elevates it to high comic art, suggesting whole unseen worlds of injury and social snobbery.
Margo’s casually haughty put-downs – “Don’t swear, Jerry. And don’t bleed in the sink; I’ve just cleaned it” – became one of the show’s highlights. Crucially, The Good Life – and Keith in her performance – likes Margo. She is an appalling snob, yes, but not an idiot, and her objections are entirely reasonable. Many viewers, myself included, found that, when they revisited the series as they got older, their sympathies switched from the idealistic Tom to the pragmatic Margo. When she protests, “I am the silent majority!” you find yourself nodding along. And her confidence in dealing with bad or truculent service is enviably terrifying – “You will have a plumber on my doorstep at nine o’clock tomorrow morning with a plunger in his hand, or you will not get a penny.”
It didn’t hurt that Margo was also magnificently sexy in a particularly memsahib-ish way. Even her more vulnerable moments (“I’m not a complete woman! I haven’t got a sense of humour!” she splutters to Tom after a few too many) suggest a real person with multiple dimensions. It is a masterpiece performance.
But Keith was only warming up. Soon afterwards, she took the star part of Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born (1979-81), which saw her character displaced by death taxes from the manor of the title to the lodge in the grounds. The manor is snapped up by entrepreneur Richard de Vere (Peter Bowles), a new-money Thatcherite with a chain of convenience stores. “You may have just bought a piece of English history, but you don’t own anything,” she informs him icily in the first episode.
Audrey is far posher than Margo, and a symbol of fading aristocracy adrift in the modern world. You would think she might be hard for a mass audience to identify with. But, to the contrary, To The Manor Born was an even more spectacular success, pulling in outrageously high viewing figures, regularly above 20 million. The final episode of its first series was the most watched (non-live-event) TV show in Britain of the entire 1970s.
Almost every line given to Audrey is a zinger, delivered with pinpoint accuracy. “I never seem to get any white envelopes these days,” she observes of her reduced circumstances, “only brown ones with those nasty little windows so the postman can tell everyone how much you owe.” Or “Democracy is all very well, but why give it to the people?” The occasional scenes of Audrey at the village-stores-cum-post office – harassing shopkeeper Daphne Oxenford – are so perfect in their back-and-forth timing and observations of the class system that you want to punch the air.
Other career highlights include Keith stealing the show as a nursery teacher in a 1969 episode of The Avengers, while the television version of The Norman Conquests that got her the part of Margo is sublime. And her appearance as the star guest of Morecambe and Wise in their legendary 1977 Christmas Special is pure joy; a radiating burst of happiness.
Keith made poshness both absurd and loveable. At the time of her greatest fame, everybody knew a Margo (many watched and wondered, “Am I Margo?”). That breed of person has vanished – or transformed into something quite different, equally haughty but now affiliated to Tom Good-style progressive causes, and far less adorable. Margo and Audrey were the last of their kind. In Penelope Keith, they had the best possible ambassador as they entered their twilight.
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
