Penelope Keith: The coolest swashbuckling sitcom ever to grace our screens | television

ABroader, more audience-friendly sitcoms thrive on stock characters: the down-and-outs, the jobs, the goofs and the snobs. There was no actor more suited to the latter than Penelope Keith. Others played it funny and arrogant, but it was a walking color scheme of snobbery. Her greatest strength was her ability to always define a new form for the same theme, choosing any number of tones and nuances to give each of her characters more life than her writers probably expected.

The biggest role, of course, was Margot Leadbeater in The Good Life, which ran from 1975 to 1978. On paper, her role was simply to provide contrast. Richard Briers and Felicity Kendall starred as Tom and Barbara, two self-sufficient dreamers in tattered clothes who were never happier than when they had dirt under their fingernails. By design, Keith was supposed to represent the opposite; Tougher, more materialistic, and more dreaded by anyone who did not follow social conventions to the letter.

However, if you go back and watch any episode of The Good Life, you’ll see how Margo is often the fun character in the group. Dressed in a spectacle of chiffon kaftan, she manages to complement the character’s suburban outline with a hidden layer of playful flirtation, often aimed at Tom. Keith also manages to play her role with a hint of personal hurt. With Margot, you feel like a woman who can see the counterculture happening, who desperately wants to explore, but is held back by society’s expectations of her.

The Good Life propelled Keith toward the starring roles her talent deserved, but Margot may remain her greatest creation. Sitcom side characters are often underwritten, but this allowed Keith to play to both of their greatest strengths; Spot the comic timing that can set off lines like a neutron bomb, and her ability to make what could be a two-dimensional trope feel like someone you’ve known your whole life.

The year after The Good Life ended, Keith set out for her next role as Audrey Forbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born (1979–1981, with a one-off special in 2007). Again, this was as solid a premise as a sitcom would allow: a penniless aristocratic widow is forced to sell her mansion and move into a cottage on the estate, where she watches in horror as its new-money millionaire owner (played by Peter Bowles) modernizes it.

This role gave Keith a lot to work with, while undermining her birthright due to her disability. Keith molds Audrey into a study of small-minded tragicomedy that is slowly undone by the machinations of the plot. As millions watched the show, it found itself subject to a softening of the main characters, reducing conflict in the process. But it was a perfect showcase of her ability to find range within a genre.

since then. Keith jumped from sitcom to sitcom. Although none of them achieve the same impact as The Good Life or To the Manor Born, many still have a lot going for them, mostly due to Keith’s performance. In 1983’s Sweet Sixteen, she played the romantic lead, if strangely sexless, as a no-nonsense businesswoman who falls in love with a much younger employee. 1990’s No Job for a Lady was a bit of a curveball in which Keith played a Labor MP, albeit looking exactly like Penelope Keith.

Keith’s last regular role on a sitcom was in 1995’s Next of Kin, a surprisingly dark show about a self-absorbed woman who has no connection to children and is upset when she learns she has inherited some grandchildren after the unexpected death of her son, whom she also didn’t love. As written, the character was very difficult to like, but Keith managed to paint her as equal parts fragile and lost. Like Margo, Audrey, and almost everyone else she played, her nuanced acting invited viewers to see the humanity behind the scenario.

It’s a difficult trick to pull off, but one that Keith manages to do over and over again. No one had been able to play the domineering arrogant man with the same precision before her, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will.