Penelope Keith was a class apart

Penelope Keith, who has died at the age of 86, was no mere actress. She was an embodiment, an avatar, an archetype – a particular kind of woman, once instantly recognisable to British audiences, now as quaint as Ladybird books and private first-class railway compartments.

The two roles for which she was best known – Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life and Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born – made her as recognisable and even adored as any character in sitcom. To the Manor Born regularly pulled audiences of over 20million, impressive figures even allowing for the fact the media landscape had not yet been fractured like a mirror ball. The series one finale pulled nearly 24million – the largest ratings of the decade for any non-live event.

The shows are still highly enjoyable, at least for those of us who saw them the first time around, the writing and performances still first class. But watching them now is closer to watching period drama than the topical and incisive satire they were 50 years ago. And Penelope Keith’s characters seem as fixed in a particular time and place as Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet and William Thackeray’s Becky Sharp.

Perhaps this is unsurprising – perhaps what I find alarming is the fact that 50 years have run under my own bridge since they first aired. After all, the events depicted in the hugely popular Upstairs Downstairs, which ran between 1971 and 1975, were themselves set in a period roughly 50 years earlier. No one was surprised to see different etiquette observed therein. But somehow it is always a shock to realise that evolution, even at the social scale, is still going on.

If Margos and Audreys are hard to find now, so are Penelope Keiths. One reason for her extraordinarily convincing portrayals of women conscious to an exquisitely painful degree of their own social status appears to have been the bespoke nature of the roles, seemingly cut to fit her own persona. Watching her being interviewed on Parkinson or Wogan, one is struck by the realisation that, if anything, she had been dialling it down a bit to play Margo.

Not that she seems remotely cold, lacking a sense of humour or incapable of a basilisk stare toward an errant husband. But her poise, her manners and especially her accent and vocal tone seem all but implausible now, as vanished as the dialects of the Cherokee, Navaho or Sioux. It is like hearing a trained concert cellist in a room full of kazoos.

Somebody on X shared a snatch of dialogue from To the Manor Born, as follows:

Audrey: We were discussing your not going to church.
De Vere: Well, I’m not religious.
Audrey: Religion doesn’t come into it.

Play that in your head and it is as distinctive a voice as Coltrane’s sax, Brian May’s guitar or Oliver Hardy’s exasperated straight-to-camera silence.

This is not to suggest she was incapable of acting, of course – though I don’t think it would be too unkind to say that she had a limited range. It would have been as ridiculous to see her cast as a plucky housing-estate mum in a Willy Russell play, or an English Erin Brockovich, say, as it would be to cast Ray Winstone as a nebbish computer programmer or Kathy Burke as the Queen. To cast her as anything other than what she was, along the class axis at least, would be like trying to make a knight move diagonally. But doing what Pelelope did – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be over-familiar, but I cannot simply refer to her as ‘Keith’ – and being who she was, she reigned supreme. And it is telling that it would be almost impossible to do so today.

The reason is, of course, the extinction – to all intents and purposes – of class. No doubt this was what the makers of Upstairs Downstairs thought had been largely achieved by the mid-Seventies, and what they thought they were allowing us to see through their distant mirror in Edwardian Belgravia: how such invisible strata, signals and shibboleths had once limited human horizons and exposed upstarts and parvenus for the charlatans they were. No doubt they flattered themselves, as I do now in 2026, that we have escaped such cruelty and scorn. No doubt there will be those who remain sceptical and think society still riddled with it.

But class, quite separate from the charmless ‘socio-economic status’, was for many years the main fault line and the mainspring of almost all British comedy. Not just the sitcom, but also comic novels, Carry On movies, stand-up and even kids’ comics. Some still attempt it – Amandaland plays with a modern equivalent of the ghastly social climber – but it is deluded, and painfully so, to pretend that this remains the great axis along which England is and will always be divided.

The genius of Penelope’s two roles was, of course, that while they were superficially similar and technically pitched at very similar altitudes, she had reached that pitch from two very different starting positions.

Margo was a social climber as excruciating in her way as Basil Fawlty, if less prone to escalating insanity. She was a woman who had been training all her life for a role as society hostess and was determined that Jerry should continue not only to fund that project but also play his own part with conviction and aplomb. She was on the up.

Audrey, on the other hand, had experienced reversals. Genuinely of what Julian Fellowes refers to as the ‘gratin’, she was as good as in the doghouse (technically the coach house), forced to endure the humiliation of seeing her own family seat in the hands of exactly the sort of parvenu that Mr Hudson and Mrs Bridges of Upstairs Downstairs knew all too well.

Both had poise and elegance but crucially – so crucially – a palpable vulnerability. This did not seem so strange at the time, that a woman should be so frosty and judgemental, and yet still tender and warm. Did we ourselves have a warmer and more flexible attitude to human foibles then, less inclined to enter them into the Excel spreadsheet of problematic human behaviour? Or was she simply a gifted communicator of the inner life between the lines?

Taken together, then, these two roles gave us both sides of the class coin in a single pressing. Or rather, something like a queen in a deck of cards, mirror images but one looking up and the other down.

Anyway, two near-as-dammit immortal roles, though for me, Margo shaded it. In a sitcom that was about as close to perfect as half an hour of muted suburban moss can be, with a perfect Jungian quartet of personality types, Margo basically stole every scene she was in. I don’t think this view is particularly controversial now. In scenes with three of the acknowledged masters of stage and screen, Margo Leadbetter was undefeated. Even when the others got the best lines, it was Margo’s reaction shot that landed the fish. Sure, The Good Life was ‘about’ Tom Good, the absurd garden-Ahab, and his long-suffering Barbara. But if it had been an American sitcom where the audience applauded their favourite actors when they made their first appearance? Well, it would have been interesting to see who was their second favourite.

Penelope Keith was magnificently out of sync, as if Nancy Mitford or some character from Upstairs Downstairs had somehow been cryogenically preserved and reawakened in the ghastliness of modern Britain – a possibility that all too many of us of a certain age feel would be the only explanation for our persistent state of bewilderment today.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.