This Country, series two - another welcome chance to keep it real with our lovable country cousins: episode one review

The climax last year of the first series of This Country (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 heavy-handed 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.