Review by Larry Stanley

Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: English
Region: Region 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 2
Run Time: 240 minutes
DVD Features:
7 episodes on 2 discs
Bonus Royal Command Performance from 1978 When I'm 65
Interview with Richard Briers
Cast bios
Trailers

Good Neighbors is probably my favorite BBC show that is non-Science Fiction. Dealing with Tom and Barbara Good's dream to live a completely self-sufficient lifestyle in England in the late 1970's, the show was a dreamboat of talent, humor and good natured ribbing (and sometimes not so good natured) at the stuffed shirts and starched collars that rule both England and the U.S.
From the troubles they endured and lessons they learned raising their own vegetables and animals to the horrors of having to kill those animals for their food. It didn't take them long to come to realize that life without refrigerators or frozen foods would not be that easy.
All of this and dealing with their conservative neighbors, the Leadbetters, Margo and Jerry, who look on in terrified friendship as the Goods step lower and lower on the community ladder.
The show has been repeated quite often on BBC and on American PBS and after watching it once or twice the viewer begins to understand why. With it double entendre, sly digs at wealth and its bother and an open attitude toward the ecology and a self sufficient lifestyle, it strikes a chord in a lot of people.
But the show is not so much about suffering as it is about showing what we could do without if we had to. The Goods learn to make their own wine, can their vegetable's, make their own clothes and even come to see the joy of being together in a world that sometimes seems to want to push couples apart.
We got to watch them for several seasons learn how to live with each other and the people around them in a new light. And we usually saw them succeed at their chosen lives.
From Tom building an electrical generator in his basement using methane from the pigs they keep, to dyeing their own clothing on the night Jerry and Margo have a big dinner with his boss (which was one of the funniest things I have seen in years) to trying to find out if Margo is having an affair, their lives revolve around home and friends instead of working themselves into an early grave for someone else.
Felicity Kendall as Barbara Good is simply wonderful. She is not only beautiful, but she is funny and talented and certainly able to hold an audiences attention, as shown in the episode "Our Speaker Today". I know I would have paid attention to her.
Penelope Keith is, as always, class and style all the way. I can't understand why would have married Jerry Leadbetter, but he was certainly one lucky man. Well, usually, except when she would boss him around.
My greatest fear is that this show will somehow be Americanized into a bad sitcom, filled with half naked, plastic boobed bimbos with no talent as so many other British Comedy's have been over the last few decades.
Because even wearing bikinis or short-shorts, few women will ever be as sexy as Felicity Kendall and Penelope Keith were.