How we made: Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles on To the Manor Born

Penelope Keith, actor

I had met the writer Peter Spence at a dinner and he showed me a pilot script for a radio series about a rich American who moves into an English manor house. He'd conceived the female lead as an upper-class version of Margot Leadbetter, whom I'd played in The Good Life. I immediately agreed to play her, opposite Bernard Braden as the American.

I'd been sent loads of scripts since starting The Good Life, but all were a pale imitation. Realising that this would make excellent television I sent the script to John Howard Davies, producer of The Good Life. He thought it was too ordinary to have a rich American in the manor, so it was decided to make him eastern European. I was asked to start filming in two months. The radio pilot was recorded, but never aired.

We filmed on location at Cricket St Thomas in Somerset, in the house owned by Peter's in-laws. I loved it because we had to do all our own stunts. I am a country girl at heart, and I got to ride horses again, to learn about bee keeping, to drive a two-tonne Rolls-Royce with impossible gears; I scaled a five-bar gate with a picnic hamper to flee a bull. The worst part was the cold. We always seemed to be outside in late winter: Angela Thorne, who played Marjory Frobisher, and I would be huge with woolly layering.

In one scene, I had to drive a horse and carriage through a rainstorm. It was a glorious day, so the fire brigade was brought in to spray water; the sensible horse flatly refused to trot through this peculiar downpour. My character had a beagle who was fine on location, but in the studio he mostly had to lie in his basket. He would only do this if fed treats, which meant he grew visibly fatter.

After shooting the location scenes we would rehearse for a week, then film in the studio in front of a live audience. This gave the performances an extra edge, although even in a studio the unpredictable could happen. Once the butler, Brabinger, had to stick his head up into a fireplace to check for a blockage. An over-zealous prop man had stuck an enormous amount of soot up the chimney and John Rudling, who played him, was covered from head to foot.

I always thought Margot Leadbetter would be a difficult role to follow, but I loved playing someone with such a strong sense of humour. Angela and I would often be sent off for giggling. But I think the strength of the series was that it was, essentially, a love story. None of us had any input because the scripts were already written and the schedules were tight. Still, there came a point when I said we would have to stop teasing the audience; I insisted that Audrey and Richard got together.

Peter Bowles, actor

I hadn't worked in the theatre for over a decade. In desperation, I went to church and prayed for a role. The next day I was sent scripts for two plays and a sitcom called The Good Life, in which I was wanted to play the role of Jerry Leadbetter, Penelope Keith's husband. I chose one of the plays and turned the sitcom down. But Richard Briers, who was to play Tom Good in The Good Life, was in the same play. I asked him how he would combine both. He explained that sitcoms were filmed on Sundays, and he phoned the producers, but it was too late: Paul Eddington had been cast.

A few years later, my agent told me he'd rejected another new sitcom with Penelope because I was committed to Rumpole of the Bailey. I was determined not to pass up a second chance of playing her husband so persuaded the powers that be at BBC and Thames Television to allow me to do both. I rehearsed Rumpole in the morning, and To the Manor Born in the afternoon.

My character, Richard DeVere, was supposed to be foreign. Thinking of Robert Maxwell, I suggested we make him Czech with aristocratic English pretensions. For the first time in my career, I decided to play the character straight, using my own personality. In the past I had always "acted" character roles – but it's essential, for a sitcom to work, not to try to be funny; you have to be an ordinary person to whom funny things happen.

The first thing I discovered was that there was no time to invent anything. You had to rehearse then film straight off, and people would start looking at their watches very quickly. The outdoor scenes were filmed first at Cricket St Thomas, out of sequence and several episodes ahead, before any of the cast had properly met; we more or less had to get to know each other in front of the camera.

During one of the series, I was in a West End play and would have to pay for a car to collect me from the theatre and drive me though the night to Somerset. We'd arrive around 2am and I'd have to be up for make up at 8am; then, when filming finished at 2pm, I'd get back in the car for the night's performance. The fares used up half my small fee.

The show cut across all classes and was watched by 20 million viewers at its peak. The day after the first episode, I walked out to get my morning paper and people stopped me in the street; when I went on stage that night there was a huge round of applause. Suddenly people wanted to talk to me – just not the BBC who, to my bafflement, didn't ask me to work for them again until the 2007 Christmas special. It gave me great satisfaction that a fortune was spent promoting Doctor Who that season, and yet the 25th anniversary To the Manor Born special only just missed out on being the top show. It changed my life.