Reporting on the death of the actor Richard Briers yesterday at 79, the online version of the Surrey Comet understandably looked for a local angle: Surbiton's Most Famous Fictional Resident Dies ran its headline - a distillation of a long and distinguished acting career that might at first glance look dismayingly reductive.
It's a risk all actors take, of course, potentially fated to be eclipsed in public memory by their best known roles - in this case that of Tom Good, the suburban subsistence farmer who, with his wife Barbara (Felicity Kendal), turned his back on the rat race in Bob Larbey and John Esmonde's 70s sitcom The Good Life. But if, as Larbey and Esmonde did when they situated their comedy, you take Surbiton as a metaphorical location rather than a real one, there's nothing really parochial about it at all. In his best known television roles, as Tom or as Martin Bryce, the fretful obsessive in Ever Decreasing Circles, Briers was never just a local man. He was a suburban everyman.
It was the kind of life he might easily have lived for real, but for a youthful attraction to the idea of performance. Leaving school at 16 without qualifications, he began his working life as a filing clerk and early attempts at amateur performance were undermined, according to his own account, by a nervous speed in delivery which often made him unintelligible to the audience. But with the encouragement of his cousin, the actor Terry-Thomas, he applied for and gained a place at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1954, doing well enough to go straight into rep on leaving.
The breathless quality of his performance didn't disappear entirely: when he played Hamlet, he told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs in 2000, "I knocked about 40 minutes off the average run". One critic described him as playing the character "like a demented typewriter". But that ability to rattle off a line proved useful in comedy. He could play rapid wit and foolish garrulity with an equal deftness.
