Village people must adapt to survive, says Dame Penelope Keith
I’m not sure how helpful this sort of story from a “National Treasure” really is in stimulating a serious debate about rural services. Apologies for fans of “To the Manor Born.” This feels like it comes from the same stable as Michael Portillo’s railway programmes. Billy Bragg lives in Dorset now – how about a rural issues series presented by him? The article tells us:
A popular actress and TV star has warned that villages need to “change with the times” in order to survive in the face of development and an exodus of young people to towns and cities.
Dame Penelope Keith is best known for her role as the snobbish suburbanite Margo Leadbetter in 1970s sitcom The Good Life, but has actually lived in a Surrey village for three decades.
After touring the country – including Dorset and Somerset – for a new programme looking at country life, she has concluded that rural communities should “adapt as well as preserve the best of their pasts”
Dame Penelope is fronting a new three-part television series exploring the “the changing face” of rural Britain.
She has taken with her a series of guidebooks published by Batsford in the 1930s which detail rural life eight decades ago, in order to highlight the changes over time.
The actress, who lives near Godalming, said she feared that village life is under threat.
She said the experience “drew attention to a common theme in the series: the loss of young people from our villages.”
“One does tend to get this idea that it’s a load of old codgers tottering around, like me, with straw in their hair, but it’s not, a lot of them are thriving,” she added.
Dame Penelope said if a second series is filmed, she would like to venture “far down into Cornwall, which is often neglected”.
Penelope Keith’s Hidden Villages begins today (Tuesday) at 9pm on More4.