British life is put under the lens to heartbreaking effect in this bold mockumentary
THE SHOW BEGINS with a familiar droll disclaimer. ‘Over the last three years, This Country has documented life in a typical Cotswolds village.’ When we think of the Cotswolds, we think of manicured cottages owned by YBAS, Kate Moss nipping to the 7/11, of metropolitan values paced on rural settings. Now entering its third and last season, This Country is the noir story of cousins Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe, a peel behind the nets of their desolate council house on the bleak outskirts of Swindon.
Kerry and Kurtan are like Little Britain characters drawn from the inside, the work of siblings Daisy-may and Charlie Cooper. They share common ground with the observational wit of The Royle Family, Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue And Bob Too, right back to the kitchen sink dramas of Shelagh Delaney’s ’60s. Because nothing ever really happens to them, the microscope they’re put under feels particularly vividly drawn.
I’m not sure it’s right to refer to This Country as comedy, though its scripts are pockmarked by some sanguine laughter and both actors make their great faces funny. They feel more like a temperature gauge of where Britain is in 2020, swelled with a forgotten class to whom the arrival of a second-hand foot spa or game of Frisbee is the one thing of rare joy that defines the day. They wouldn’t care less about Brexit. In or out of the EU, this British life grinds along its grey path. A bed-bound, unseen nana upstairs, barking for attention, feels closer to a commentary on the care system than anything Ken Loach could draw up.
The apolitical aspect of the Mucklowes’ tender familial friendship is political by its very nature, however disengaged from the system they appear. A soft vicar figure occasionally appears to offer spiritual guidance to these necessarily godless antiheroes. If This Country is defined by any branch of humour, it is defiantly gallows.
We begin season three, then, on a fittingly macabre note with the death, from cancer, of their young friend Slugs. The actor who plays him has also died, giving This Country a vérité feel that can sting with unbearable sadness. It might be the saddest/happiest show to ever grace the British TV screen. It breaks my heart. Mondays, BBC One, 10.35pm or BBC Three iplayer