Tom Good

Tom Good is a thirty-something draughtsman who, on his fortieth birthday, decides he's had enough of designing plastic tokens for cereal boxes. He talks his wife Barbara into quitting the rat race entirely, turning their suburban Surbiton garden into a self-sufficient smallholding, complete with vegetables, pigs and homemade everything. He is enthusiastic, idealistic and often impractical.

Richard Briers plays Tom's conviction with such open-faced delight that his scheme never curdles into smugness, even as it inconveniences everyone around him. The comedy comes from watching a genuinely decent man pursue a good idea past the point of sense, and Briers keeps him lovable precisely because he believes every word of it.