Penelope Keith Sitcom Snob The Good Life To The Manor Born

Penelope Keith: the most spectacular sitcom snob ever to grace our screens

In The Good Life, To the Manor Born and beyond, the star played domineering snobs with pinpoint comic timing – yet she still made them feel like old friends. No one will do it better

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At their broadest, and most audience-friendly, sitcoms thrive on stock characters: chancers, jobsworths, slobs and snobs. No actor has ever been more suited to the last than Penelope Keith. Others have played funny snobs, but she was a walking colour chart of snobbery. Her greatest strength was her ability to always locate a new variation on the same theme, picking out any number of tones and nuances to give each of her characters more life than their writers probably anticipated.

The big one, of course, was Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life, which ran from 1975 to 1978. On paper, her role was simply to provide contrast. Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal played the leads, Tom and Barbara, two self-sufficient dreamers in frayed clothes who were never happier than when they had dirt under their fingernails. By design, Keith was meant to represent the opposite; stiffer and more materialistic and appalled by anyone who didn’t follow social convention to the letter.

Yet, if you go back and watch any episode of The Good Life, you’ll see how Margo is quite often the fun one of the group. Clad in a kaleidoscope of chiffon kaftans, she managed to round out the character’s suburbanite blueprint with a hidden layer of playful flirtation, often aimed at Tom. Keith also managed to play her with a hint of private hurt. With Margo, you got the sense of a woman who could see the counterculture happening, and desperately wanted to explore, but was held back by society’s expectations of her.

The Good Life launched Keith towards the starring roles that her talent deserved, but Margo may well remain her greatest creation. Sitcom side characters are often underwritten, but this allowed Keith to play to both of her greatest strengths; pinpoint comic timing that could detonate lines like a neutron bomb, and her ability to make what could have been a two-dimensional trope feel like someone you’ve known all your life.

The year after The Good Life ended, Keith bounded towards her next role as the imperious Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born (1979 to 1981, with a one-off special in 2007). Again, this was as solid a premise as a sitcom will allow: a bankrupt aristocratic widow is forced to sell her mansion and move to a cottage on the estate, where she watches aghast as its gauche new-money millionaire owner (played by Peter Bowles) modernises it.

The role gave Keith plenty to work with, with the domineering hauteur of her birthright undercut by the powerlessness of her situation. Keith formed Audrey into a study of small-minded tragicomedy that was slowly undone by the machinations of the plot. While the show was watched by millions, it found itself succumbing to a softening between the leads, minimising conflict in the process. But it was a perfect showcase for her ability to find range within a type.

From then on. Keith hopped from sitcom to sitcom. Although none of them landed with the same impact as The Good Life or To the Manor Born, several still have plenty going for them, most often due to Keith’s performance. In 1983’s Sweet Sixteen she played a romantic lead, if a strangely sexless one, as a no-nonsense businesswoman who falls in love with a much younger employee. No Job for a Lady in 1990 was a curveball in that Keith played a Labour MP, albeit one who looked and sounded exactly like Penelope Keith.

Keith’s final regular sitcom role was 1995’s Next of Kin, a surprisingly dark show about a self-absorbed woman with no affinity with children who is annoyed to learn that she has inherited some grandchildren after the unexpected death of her son, whom she didn’t love either. As written, the character was almost spectacularly difficult to like, but Keith managed to paint her as equal parts brittle and lost. Like Margo and Audrey and almost everyone else she played, her nuanced acting invited viewers to see the humanity behind the script.

It’s a hard trick to pull off, but it’s one that Keith managed to do time and time again. Nobody was able to play domineering snobs with the same precision before her, and it’s unlikely that anyone ever will.