Farewell vicar, and farewell to the beloved This Country
So farewell to This Country (BBC Three), which bowed out after three perfect series. This is a show you either get or you don’t; for every person who loves it, there is another baffled by its popularity. Its funniest running gag is Kerry’s mum, who exists only as a disembodied voice screeching down the stairs about falafels.
The mockumentary style owes a great deal to The Office, which in turn was inspired by The Larry Sanders
Show of the 1990s. It could have been hackneyed but it is not, due to the brilliant writing and the performances of the two leads, Daisy May and Charlie Cooper. Inspired by their own upbringing in Cirencester, they have shown us a side of the Cotswolds that couldn’t be further from the faux-rural nonsense plastered all over Instagram these days, by people who think they’ve mastered country living because they drive to their holiday cottage in an Audi Q7.
The tedium is part of the comedy and usually nothing much happens, but in this finale there was a bombshell. The vicar, The Rev Francis Seaton (Paul Chahidi) stunned Kerry and Kurtan by telling them he was leaving for a new parish in Bristol. Their reaction did
This Country’s dual thing of showing the characters’ vulnerability – Kurtan trying to mask his hurt at the thought of losing his mentor, and using a Toy
Story analogy to do it – while delivering deadpan asides. “He has no idea what Bristol’s like. It’s all just smackheads and knife crime,” said Kurtan. Kerry chipped in: “And Clifton Suspension Bridge. But when you’ve driven over that once, you’ve driven over that a thousand times.”
Some of the episode was devoted to Kerry revelling in her new role as “Lord of the Harvest”, strong-arming the locals into handing over their tinned goods. But it was mostly about Kerry and Kurtan’s touching relationship with the vicar, with a wonderful performance by Chahidi. In a sense, This Country is the best PR the Church of England has had in years, showing what a vital role it can play in communities.
As the reality slowly dawned on the vicar of what a move to a rough part of Bristol would entail, while Kerry and Kurtan embarked on a typically rubbish plan to guilt-trip him into staying, it looked as if the series would end with him somehow escaping the move. But life isn’t like that.
“You’re a legend, but you’re annoying as well,” Kerry told the vicar as they said their goodbyes. To non-fans of the show, that would seem a banal sort of line. But to the rest of us, it was enough to bring a tear to the eye.
The documentary Toxic Town:
The Corby Poisonings (BBC Two) was a story of mothers who fought for their children, and the journalists, lawyers and experts who took up their case. It was also an object lesson in corporate failure, personified by the council chief who appeared in archive interviews throughout the film to insist that there was nothing to see here, no scandal, just move along.
In a small Northamptonshire town once dominated by a steelworks, babies were being born with limb deformities. The plant had been demolished as part of Europe’s biggest land reclamation project and replaced by toxic waste sites, and an investigation had uncovered a link. But the council boss was adamant: there was no link, no cluster, no blame. The authorities had done everything in an “exemplary” fashion. Those babies? Just an unfortunate coincidence.
Then along came a solicitor, Des Collins, to fight for justice. If you thought this sounded like the plot of a thriller, Collins agreed. One day he arrived at work to find a brown envelope, sent by an anonymous whistleblower, stuffed with thousands of pages of documents to help his case. “Like something out of a John Grisham novel,” as he put it.
One of the most interesting aspects was the spotlight on the detailed work of the specialists involved in proving the case, and the passion each held for their subject. “Dust particles to most people are just a nuisance around the house. To me, they are extremely complicated scientific phenomena,” said Prof Tony Cox, who analysed the data on air pollution.
What was unclear was why we were being shown this film now. The High Court case, which resulted in Corby council paying compensation to the families of 18 children after the judge ruled it had been negligent in the redevelopment of the steelworks, was 11 years ago. But what shone through was the strength of the mothers. “They treated us like we were mums from Corby,” one said of the way their concerns were dismissed. Those mums proved to be formidable.
This Country ★★★★★
Toxic Town: The Corby Poisonings ★★★