This Country

Kurtan and Kerry are at a bus stop - they aren't waiting for a bus.

Kurtan: (points off camera)  Over there we saw Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen once and once in the shop and once up Burley Hill riding his bike, didn’t we?

Kerry: (wanting to be part of the yarn) And in the Co-op.

Kurtan: Yeah.

Kerry: Because I was walking in the Co-op and he was coming out and I said, “After you,” and he said, “No, after you.” (In awe) He’s so humble.

Kurtan:  So humble. And I asked him, “When do we get to see you back on our screens. (Getting emotional) Because it’s a crying shame that I don’t get to see you as often. And he just shrugged.

Kerry:   And he just shrugged like that. (Her shrugged shoulders a homage to her hero)  It’s such a shame.

Kerry and her cousin Kurtan are stuck in limbo. Living an unemployed existence, the pair aimlessly tread the land. Kerry Mucklowe lives with her mother, a shout upstairs, that we never see. Like a child with a new hobby, her father has started a new family, which means he 'must' cast out the old.  Lee “Kurtan” Mucklowe resides across the road with his grandmother. He goes by the sobriquet “Kurtan” because of his 90’s hairstyle. 

I appreciate so far this all sounds very miserable and Mike Leigh. 

But Kurtan’s hairstyle is a metaphor for the Mucklowe’s: although they have failed to move out of the Cotswold village like their peers, they’re pleased to be stuck in the past. The two invoke school days like they were yesterday and hang around with children half their age. Afraid of the future, enthral to the past, they’re a couple of Holden Caulfield’s, aware that yesterday is safely familiar; whereas tomorrow is frightfully uncertain. For each other, they’re the catcher in the rye, preventing the other from falling into adulthood. They sustain each other but they restrict each other too. They’re one others jailer; they’re one another’s saviour. They're bound by blood, rooted in soil. They will not be separated.

Young and lost.

Some of you might be thinking that I belong in Pseuds Corner for likening a BBC Three comedy to Salinger’s Catcher. I think great literature and comedy can go hand in hand. This week I was listening to Ben Elton's lecture on the sitcom. He made the intelligent case for comedy, arguing it does something far more powerful than drama, in that it tells truths whilst eliciting laughs. Just because something is funny it doesn’t mean it can’t be profound. The Office has characters stuck in delusions just like Tennessee Williams' creations; Steptoe and Son has a Beckettian pair quarrelling through oblivion; and Fawlty Towers has the thwarted ambition of an Arthur Miller play. These great sitcoms are bank jobs of the mind: they may wear a comedy mask, but peel it back and you're faced with brutal truths. Great comedy is Art- to claim otherwise is pretentious.

This Country ‘s two characters are cousins, when their creators are in actual fact siblings. Daisy May Cooper’s time at RADA had been unhappy and fruitless. Away from her Cirencester home, she suffered from homesickness and class consciousness. On leaving drama school, her CV slipped so far that even her agent forgot about her. Her brother’s life followed a similar trajectory. Staying at home rather than attending university, Charlie Cooper worked in Argos and a sausage factory. With Daisy returning home, Charlie collaborated with her on ideas that would go on to become This Country. To date, it’s one of the most downloaded iPlayer shows, becoming popular enough to transfer onto BBC One. Unsurprisingly, it has been recommissioned for a second series.

In the first paragraph I gave you the backstory of the characters without sharing any of the content. So here is a flavour: in the first episode, Limbo is displaced by Pandemonium as the village gets all excited by the annual scarecrow competition. The residents have been spending the summer stuffing their creations and now want recompense. Kurtan has been working round-the-clock to ensure victory is his (he does have the advantage of having nothing else to do). However, when he arrives at the competition, he finds his scarecrow overlooked by novelty ones, hardly in keeping with the tradition he holds sacred. Without giving away the end, I’ll just say Kurtan has a burning ambition to lift the crown, and leave you to mull that sentence. Meanwhile, Kerry is up in arms over the ‘pluming’ in her home. This isn’t to do with burst pipes or leaking cisterns, but the fact that her house is being attacked with plums. Earlier in a David Brent Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell, Didcot moment she bemoans gang life, 

“I got enemies in South Cerney, I got enemies in North Cerney, I got enemies in Cerney Wick. I got enemies in Bourton-on-the-Water.” 

Kerry’s crew comprised of ten-year-olds will not let sleeping dogs lie; consequently, they stalk the village looking for the perpetrator. A scarecrow competition and drive-by pluming aren’t typical sitcom plot-lines, but due to the upbringing of the creators they circumvent village stereotype, feeling completely natural and authentic.

Kerry and her posse.

Above, I spoke about the influence of The Office, and unlike most post-Brent mockumentaries, this does Gervais and Merchant proud. A lot of sitcoms in this style feel inauthentic because you wonder why on earth a documentary crew would film there. With This Country being an unvarnished look at rural life, it feels like an unexpurgated version of Countryfile. something the BBC would make to provide balance. Kerry and Kurtan also love television, fawning over Dragons Den and Masterchef, so it’s understandable why they would welcome the cameras. And although they’re not as stupid as they look, neither are they as smart as they purport, meaning they can’t maintain a façade: we see them both as belligerent bullies and victims of circumstance. They aren’t just a pair of Holden Caulfieds then; they’re a couple of David Brents. We come to love them because beneath the rhubarb and bluster they’re decent and honest. They are capable of unintentional cruelty and intentional kindness. They do good; they do bad. They're human.

This Country is in the great sitcom tradition of being an underdog story. Six chapters are available on YouTube. So click on and read Gloucestershire’s answer to Catcher in the Rye.