Margo Leadbetter

Margo Leadbetter lives next door to the Goods in respectable Surbiton, and she intends to keep it that way. Married to Jerry, devoted to committees, coffee mornings and the correct way of doing things, she watches Tom and Barbara's sudden descent into self-sufficiency with open horror. She is bossy, snobbish, easily scandalised, and entirely convinced she is right.

Penelope Keith could have played Margo as pure snob, but she gives her a rigidity so absolute it becomes funny in itself — the ramrod posture, the strangled vowels, the wounded dignity when the world refuses to behave properly. The writing lets her be genuinely appalling and still oddly sympathetic, a woman terrified of anything unplanned.