KEY POINTS:
This sounded like a good idea. Or a goodish idea. Take one sitcom from the 70s about a couple turning their back on the rat race and their suburban backyard into a mini-farm, complete with pigs and snobby neighbours.
Then transfer that idea to the 21st century (wow, time travel is real after all) and make it a reality show.
What on earth possesses these telly people? The Real Good Life (Sundays, 7pm, TV One) turned out to be not such a good idea in Britain where ratings indicated that people got about as excited about couples replicating the old, not at all real good, life as they would about watching compost composting.
I believe the technical telly term for such a show is a stinker.
What next? Recreate Men Behaving Badly as a reality show? Or Dad's Army? Now that would be hilarious. It might actually, compared with The Real Good Life.
It borrows that jaunty tune, and, the promos promise some wag will name a couple of ducks after Margot and Jerry from the real Good Life.
There are three couples. Posh, not so posh, and not posh at all. Posh Veronica says, "I think I can be self-sufficient and still be glamorous. If Felicity Kendall managed it, I can."
Well, maybe, honey. This is dispelled early on with a shot of a man with his arm up a chicken's bum.
"Cleaning chickens' arses," he says. "That's class."
You never saw anything so nasty and crass on The Good Life. Times have changed.
I'll say. You can't get proper posh people like Margot and Jerry these days. There are no proper snobs left, or at least no one who admits to being a proper snob.
Still, there will be a bit of not getting on. The couples find early on that idyll is not a definition of spending 24 hours a day in your spouse's company.
Neil, who is posh (ish) Veronica's husband, isn't interested in vegetables.
What he likes doing is brewing beer then drinking beer. He has obviously watched The Good Life and has learned that ignoring your wife is all part of being in character.
So maybe times haven't changed all that much. The voiceover said: "It was all very different. Women rarely had careers. And men, well, they were still men."
The men still get to do all the digging. The women still get to do all the nagging.
The real problem with The Real Good Life is that it's shot over a year and vegetables take a very long time to grow.
As everyone involved will find out, instant gratification, in the form of takeaways and chips and fizzy drinks, was invented for a reason. It makes for better telly.
This sort of telly is not for the instant-gratification generation. It's for the 70s.
It's all chicken's bum really, but reasonable fun.
Well, more fun than watching the compost heap. But nowhere near as much fun as watching re-runs of the not real The Good Life.
