Bob Larbey, who has died aged 79, was renowned as a television sitcom and screenplay writer with his professional partner John Esmonde for 30 years: they wrote The Good Life (starring Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal, Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington as the Surbiton neighbours) and a second Briers vehicle, Ever Decreasing Circles.
They had broken through with the highly popular late-1960s sitcom Please Sir! (rejected by the BBC but taken up by ITV) in which John Alderton made his name as a newly qualified teacher grappling with a crowd of mouthy fifth-formers in a rough London area. And they signed off with a BBC 1990s series, Mulberry, in which Karl Howman as the son of Death (disguised as a manservant) parried the barbs and put-downs of his employer, a cantankerous old spinster brilliantly played by Geraldine McEwan.
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