Giles & Sue Live The Good Life
It was a wonderful thing to feel ones hands in the warm soil, to eat lovely boiled new potatoes straight from the earth, to poach fresh-laid eggs for breakfast every morning, to grow close to our lovely goats (and less close to our smelly, randy pigs).
After endless episodes of our series The Supersizers Go… (great show, crap title), in which we traced the history of food and attempted to eat as people ate in every era from the Roman Occupation to the 1980s, Sue Perkins and I decided it was time to get even further back to basics, and not just eat as people used to eat, or even to cook as people used to cook, but to raise our food from the very ground, as people did as a matter of course not so very long ago.
Okay, so in essence we were setting out to recreate the hilariously inappropriate suburban self-sufficiency of Tom and Barbara Good in the classic 1970s sitcom The Good Life, but in attempting to grow crops, raise chickens for eggs, goats for milk, butter and cheese, and pigs for meat within the confines of a medium-sized London garden we were getting to the core of what this Lovefood website is all about: taking food seriously, rolling with the seasons, keeping it simple, doing it for real, starting from scratch…
It was an amazing summer, but the thing Sue and I kept asking ourselves was, could we imagine doing this for real, on our own time, when the filming was over, for the rest of our lives, or was it all just a silly sitcom gag?
It was a wonderful thing to feel ones hands in the warm soil, to eat lovely boiled new potatoes straight from the earth, to poach fresh-laid eggs for breakfast every morning, to grow close to our lovely goats (and less close to our smelly, randy pigs), and to end each exhausting day with a glass of homemade cider outdoors under the setting sun. But we had help, all sorts of onscreen experts and off-screen flunkies. If we hadn’t, and it was just down to a pair of lazy media dipsos like us, the crops would have withered in the ground and every animal would have been dead within a week.
And it was summer. God knows what happens in winter, but I know that it gets cold. Nothing grows. Animals freeze. And so do people. If we had to rely on pigpoo-dependent methane generators and a rubbish old Raeburn for our heat and cooking throughout a British winter we’d be as dead as the chickens by Christmas.
Self-sufficiency is all very well, and I got enough of a taste of it to contemplate, perhaps, one day doing something a bit like it myself – but in the countryside, with plenty of land, not in a pokey little suburban garden. And, even then, using modern (rather than 1970s) techniques, and having a proper job too, so that I could buy all the stuff I couldn’t grow (a life without French wine and American television, for example, would be unthinkable).
But to do it in the suburbs is utterly ridiculous and quite impossible. The very thought of it makes me double up with laughter. Hang on, I think I’ve got quite a good idea for a sitcom.
Giles & Sue Live The Good Life is on Mondays from 9pm on BBC2 starting tonight.
Also worth your attention:
Buy the book - Giles and Sue Live The Good Life
The Good Life - Complete Boxed Set [DVD]
The Supersizers Go... on BBC Two: A fun look back at food in history
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