The Good Life may have made Surbiton synonymous with suburbia, but 35 years after the show brought self-sufficiency to the commuter belt, the programme’s creator has revealed he has never visited the town he made famous.

Bob Larbey, who wrote the show with John Esmonde, laughed when told the programme became such a cliche that Surrey Comet reporters were once banned from mentioning the Good Life in Surbiton stories.

In fact, the fateful decision to link the two came about by chance. Mr Larbey said: “To be honest, we were just looking for something that sounded like suburbia in big capital letters. We just picked it at random.

“I have only ever driven through Surbiton on the way back to Thames Television. That is the most connection I have had with it. It just seemed right.”

In the course of four series, set in The Avenue, Tom and Barbara Good lived off the produce of their garden while Margo and Jerry Leadbetter next door looked on in bemusement.

Although some residents of the real-life street believe it was shot there, the show was actually filmed in Northwood, north London.

Mr Larbey laughed again when he heard there was a real-life The Avenue in Surbiton, and said: “Oh my God, is there? I apologise to all residents there.

“I did not even know it existed. It just seemed right. We said where do people live, and something simple like The Avenue sounded right.”

The real-life road does not conform to its TV name-sake, however, with a mixture of Victorian houses divided into flats, modern terraces and low blocks of flats, and not a sign of goats, vegetable patches or home-dyed wool.

Resident David Walker said: “It comes over as a very stock broker belt image, which there is in some parts, but mostly it’s a very mixed area and when you come down towards Tolworth it gets a bit Asian.

“But there is this Margo thing here. There are different groups of middle aged women like the light opera society. There is a lot of what was in the Good Life, but there is also much more.”

Benedicte Williams came to road four years ago, and said: “When I moved here I thought ‘wow, this is posh’, and as a black person I noticed there are not many black people living here. Since then I have seen more black people. It is not the Good Life image but I don’t mind it.”

Mr Larbey believes the key to the show’s success lay in making the two couples friends rather than enemies, and viewers were drawn to the idea of breaking out of everyday life.

He said: “The idea started with us thinking about someone on his 40th birthday, when people ask what did they do with their life.

“Self-sufficiency just occurred. We could just have easily had said he bought a boat and sailed across the world but the filming would have been very difficult.”

The Surrey Comet offered Mr Larbey, now in his mid-70s, a chance to finally visit the town he immortalised, but, just as Jerry Leadbetter might have done, he politely declined.