Keeping it real with our lovable country cousins
The climax last year of the first series of (BBC Three), the mockumentary set in a fictional, sleepy Cotswolds village, was not really a climax at all. Kurtan Mucklowe (Charlie Cooper) decided not to go to Swindon college. And so the first episode of the second series began with Kurtan and his cousin Kerry (Daisy Cooper) doing precisely what they’d done for all six episodes of series one – which is to say not much at all.
In a less finely tuned comedy, having so little of what you might call narrative would be a problem, but This Country’s subject and main interest is stasis. Kurtan – a dead ringer, coincidentally, for Mackenzie Crook’s Gareth Cheeseman in The Office – was looking for love on dating app Tinder “but getting no matches because no one round here is on Tinder”. He had also cut himself off from his former mentor, the local vicar (Paul Chahidi), in a spat over some cress they were growing together.
Kerry, meanwhile, had decided to change, where change of course meant remaining exactly the same. Her turning over of a new leaf consisted of taking Kurtan’s place as the vicar’s protégé and, in a bid to impress, performed random acts of kindness (such as giving local friend Slug her old Playstation or providing heavyhanded security, gratis, at a local screening of Grease).
The obvious dangers for a mockumentary about people living in the margins is that the mockery preys on the weak: This Country could quite easily have found itself ridiculing the yokels for being thick. The fact that it doesn’t is down to the Cooper siblings in their roles as both writers and actors. The script is laden with subtle but pithy observations offset, plus the performances are full of tenderness, both for their characters and, at times, for each other. You can tell, let’s just say, that the Coopers grew up together in Cirencester and took copious notes.
For all of their cleverness, mockumentaries, with those excruciating pauses and winks to camera, can be uncomfortable to watch. This Country has tweaked the formula, importing a key element from good sitcom – a pair of characters (in Kurtan and Kerry) that viewers desperately want to escape, while knowing full well that they never will.
Pity the poor writers landed with the task of making a daytime detective series set in leafy Warwickshire. How to avoid all of those clichés, not only of the setting – Shakespeare country, wood-beamed pubs – but of the genre? How to get away from the dishevelled private investigator kicked out of the police force and now trying to make sprightly badinage with his perky new sidekick; how to make something other than the typical mildly escapist whodunit that needs to be wrapped up in 45 minutes before the afternoon school run?
In Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators (BBC One), the writers appear to have confronted these clichés by including every one of them – first and foremost by naming their private detectives Shakespeare and Hathaway. I won’t expand on the crassness of pairing a Shakespeare with his one-time wife in modern-day Stratford, other than to say that if they really had to do the whole Shakespearean thing then they should have called it Puck and Bottom.
Anyway, what we got was a nice, cosy drama in which Frank Hathaway (Mark Benton) teamed up with Lu Shakespeare (Jo Joyner) after she went to him with a case. Not only had she just sold her hair salon, but she had a good eye for detail and her fiancé had just been murdered. Peg, meet hole.
There was plenty to dislike about Shakespeare & Hathaway the programme, not least Hathaway’s secretary Sebastian (Patrick Walshe Mcbride), a bushy-tailed luvvie in a cravat. The running joke was meant to be his effeminacy – a seam of humour last mined in the Eighties and not hugely missed.
But given that daytime drama is not really the place for complexity or grit, the first episode of Shakespeare & Hathaway did at least set up two leading characters you’d want to see more of. Benton has pretty much got “likeable slob with soup-stain on his lapel” characters sewn up and here he was again the linchpin. Joyner had the harder task, in that Shakespeare’s path from hairdresser to sleuth by way of murdered fiancé lay somewhere on the risible side of plausible. She just about pulled it off… apart from the daft name. Even now, that still rankles.
This Country ★★★★ Shakespeare and Hathaway: Private Investigators ★★