Programme Information

In a suburban garden in north-west London that has become their temporary piece of The Good Life, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, suitably attired in wellies and check shirts, are receiving expert guidance on how best to treat their chickens for a touch of red mite. Programme Information's Tony Matthews has free range to find out what they're up to.

While Sue seems quite at home sprinkling powder onto the business end of the chickens, Giles is noticeably less keen. "Handling chickens is interesting every time you do it," says Sue, "they're quite delicate and you've got to apply quite a lot of force to keep their wings from flapping without them getting stressed. You can feel the heart beating through quite a thin membrane, but you have to get on and do it."

It's 35 years since The Good Life, one of the BBC's most loved comedies, was first broadcast, and to celebrate the fact Giles and Sue are mounting a none-too-serious attempt at trying out a self-sufficient life as envisaged by Tom and Barbara Good (Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal). As Giles points out, this is the "Eglu generation" and environmental and economic factors have made the concept popular again. After their romps through culinary history as the Supersizers, Giles and Sue are the perfect couple to examine whether The Good Life is possible in 21st-century Britain. In real life they are exactly as seen on-screen, talking ten-to-the-dozen, interrupting and cutting across each other with one-liners, half-finished thoughts and rapier wit while sending up the whole concept and themselves.

After a brief tour of some slightly sorry looking cabbages that have been savaged by a rat, assorted root vegetables and a few strawberries in the front garden that Sue observes "could feed us for up to three seconds", they settle down in the pigpen to talk abut self-sufficiency in the company of a pair of seemingly docile Gloucester Old Spots. "One of them got out once," says Sue, "it destroyed an entire bed – they are so strong, it's nose goes at 45 degrees and just hoovers everything ... I can't reveal too much, but the male pig turns out to be quite the little charmer, he's something of a model in the world of Gloucester Old Spots."

The reality of pig-rearing is unlikely to gladden the heart of any would-be self-sufficient person. "You can get about £280 for a pig," explains Giles, "but they cost £80 to buy and £100 to feed, so that's about a hundred quid profit for four months of shovelling manure – it's a bit like working in TV!" he laughs.

"Meat is artificially cheap and the ultimate price is animal welfare," adds Sue. "I'm a soft touch when it comes to animal welfare, I anthropomorphise and I sympathise with the pig. I even offered to buy the goats' freedom the other day – but I've learnt that well-intentioned people don't always make the best animal husbandry experts."

Sue is "mostly vegetarian", only very occasionally eating meat, whereas for Giles the ideal pig would have four legs and a body made of chops. "Mostly I don't worry," he says. "I want them to have a nice time, but only so they taste nice." Sue adds, "It's important to talk about the food chain, but we're the sort of people who want to eat the pig while understanding that you have a responsibility to them."

They have grown fond of the goats and are surprisingly knowledgeable about the digestive habits of their pair of British Alpines, who have slight diarrhoea after eating cabbages. "The goats are my favourites," says Sue, "they are so friendly and, if you have space, they produce masses of milk and the cheese isn't bad... if a bit bland."

Goat's milk aside, Giles concedes that the Good Life hasn't quite worked out as envisaged. "We have had a fantastic thistle harvest and there have been a number of other failures, but if we'd totally succeeded we wouldn't have a programme. The biggest challenge is to understand how much you need," he adds, noting that the entire contents of the garden might just about feed some friends for Sunday lunch. "It's not enough to just plant, you need to plant again and keep a journal and charts and plan it all. We've just been a bit silly and half-hearted – there's a reason that [Gardeners' World presenter] Carol Klein is where she is."

Were they fans of the original Good Life? "I remember it fondly," says Giles, "but, watching it now, you can wait for a long time for a joke. We've got so used to American comedy like 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm where it's laugh, laugh, laugh, that it seems a bit slow."

"It's not for our generation to mock a sitcom which was voted ninth best comedy of all time and had 17m people watching it," says Sue. "It's a marvellous piece of television heritage and I aspire to its viewing figures in the knowledge that I will never get halfway close."

As part of the Good Life experience, they also get to see how the other half lived which, for Sue, means trying on some of Margo's (Penelope Keith's) dresses from the original show. Despite seeing herself as "more Barbara", being Margo for a while affords Sue the opportunity to "get slightly hammered on the old sherry".

"Those dresses don't have the solid uphold lift that you might think," she says. "In the Seventies they obviously thought it was fine to let it all hang out. I think I'd like to be Barbara from Monday to Friday and Margo for the weekend, but it would be tortuous to be one or the other full-time... and I'll never win 'rear of the year' like Felicity Kendal." To which Giles chips in: "You never know, it's like Miss World now, it's much more about your personality..."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Giles tends to identify with Paul Eddington's urbane Jerry, rather than the more saintly Tom. Jerry, on the other hand, is "either working or sitting around with his shrewish wife drinking gin and tonic. There's also this sort of wife-swapping subtext, he is always looking wistfully over the fence – keys in the bowl and off they go!"

As befits the presenters of Supersizers, drink is rarely far away and Giles and Sue can't resist a Seventies party. "Bringing shame and disgrace on our families," she confesses, "we drank what they might have drunk at a cocktail party in 1976 – bottle of advocaat, bottle of gin and a bottle of vodka – my memory is hazy. With most TV you have to be very sober, but with us it's 'put them in the outfit, give them a bottle of vodka and wheel them in front of the turkey'."

From a healthier point of view, the risottos, pea soup, and other basic smallholding fare did prove successful. "Eggs straight out of the chicken into the pan are delicious," says Sue. "You don't get eggs like that at a supermarket. We've done a lot of bottling and pickling, made loads of chutney and I've knitted lots – shawls for the pigs, cosies for the chickens – and Giles has got a really sinister gold waistcoat that I knitted."

But self-sufficiency is not just about stuff you grow, it includes making-your-own and bartering. "There's an element in which you are still participating in real life and not entirely divorced from everybody else," says Giles. "I swapped eggs with the local butcher for bacon, which I think quite appealed to him; I thought he wouldn't want to, but he did."

After paying tribute to The Good Life, do they fancy revisiting any other comedy classics? They consider Fawlty Towers, but Giles's slightly hopeful suggestion that they try Man About The House would surely spoil the dynamic between the two. "We've got used to the way we bicker now," he says. "I think we find each other interesting and there are things I do that Sue seems to find amusing that nobody else would."

The secret, Sue believes is that there's nothing forced about their partnership. "We have fun and I hope people have fun watching. I also hope we haven't destroyed The Good Life for ever."