Bovarism, Chechov and Doing Nothing: This Country on BBC 3
By Ada Bronowski
It started quietly on the outlier BBC 3 channel, but This Country, an original comedy series by brother and sister writers and actors, Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper, has grown to the proportions of a work of art and an emblem of contemporary Britain: nasty (read nihilistic), brutish (read Brexit) and short (read short-sighted with no future on the horizon).
The series, which has now been announced as completed after three seasons, is a documentary-mockumentary following the trials and tribulations of two twenty-something village bums from a Cotswold village. They are cousins Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe (played by the real-life brother and sister creators), with a Dickensian self-descriptive surname, and first names which immediately locate them on the lower end of the class ladder. They have only one another in this world – a world which spans the distance from the parish church to Kerry’s claustrophobic semi-detached.
The force of the mockumentary genre, familiar to many from The Office, is that it draws on the communication codes of the documentary form in channelling our expectations for realism and our readiness to accept otherness and strangeness on the premise that we, through the eye of the documentarist, are neutral observers. At the same time, those very same codes are exploded since it is not actually real life that is being documented. In this way, both the pretension of the documentarist to document real life and the subjects themselves which are being documented become the double-target of the mockumentary’s mockery.
The effect is rather subtle since the comedy arises out of the warped relation to reality of the mockumentary’s subjects: they are ‘playing at being real’ and therefore not acting a part, because they are supposed to be real! This is doubled-up by our own perception of reality, as we both know and do not know how real or unreal the show actually is. This twice-removed relation to reality is explicitly tackled in a scene from season 3 episode 3 in which we are in Kerry’s kitchen watching her watching television; the programme she is watching is the reality show Gogglebox, in which ‘real people’ talk about what they are watching on television. Faced with so many levels of appearances of appearances of reality, Plato would run away in disgust, but we, all the wiser for our post-modern savviness, relish every moment.
Kerry has all the external indications of having completely given up on life; she is an amorphous blob in sweatpants and oversized t-shirts, slouching about with teenage bravado next to her stick-insect cousin Kurtan of the curtain-haired fringe. They make up the eternal complementary comic duo from Laurel and Hardy to French and Saunders – only they are not trying to be funny – of course they’re not! – since they are real misfits in a real-life boring village.
She lives with a mother whom we know only from her shrieks and squeals coming from the bedroom she never seems to leave. Their communication is mostly based on the word ‘what??’ bellowed from the ground floor kitchen to an unchartered first floor, whose existence we surmise from the glimpses of a staircase outside the narrow doorway of the kitchen. Kurtan lives with his ‘nan’ whom we meet once in the whole three seasons for a few seconds and whose face is blurred ‘since she doesn’t want to be seen in a documentary’, furious about the offensive (i.e. realistic) portrait the show makes of life in her village. Kurtan spends most of his time at Kerry’s. Doing what? Mostly nothing. But a kind of nothing the telling of which fills up the days.
There is a lot of talking, telling, explaining and analysing in the show as befits a documentary: our heroes, self-importantly, answer questions, explain events and other people to us with a wealth of linguistic idiosyncrasies, jubilant grammatical transgressions and life-affirming swearing. As a consequence of this focus on Kerry and Kurtan, we hardly ever see anything happen or any interaction between our two protagonists and the outside world, and yet their conversations are full of stories past and present of memorable actions and confrontations involving themselves or others.
The comic effects derived from the clash between what we see and what we hear said about what we never see are riveting and each time unexpected: from Kerry’s self-description as a feared violent presence in her village compared with the reality of an introverted under-developed marginalised village idiot, to Kurtan’s complaint that all they did for a week was to get a coin out of a well with a piece of string to which he stands corrected by Kerry who is incensed by his reductionist attitude: ‘you know that’s total rubbish, since we also buried a carp’.
And there lies the tipping point, where the sublime hilarity and the bewildering misery of this life in this country converge into something momentous and unique. It all hangs on this ‘also’, which has the power to transform dismal nothingness into more than you can dream of.
The real theme of This Country is the everyday fantasising, the banality of self-delusion, the unwitting sublimation of ordinary life by the least sublime set of people. It renews ties with tragi-comic worlds which few British comedies have gone to. For, unlike many great masterpieces, This Country does not exacerbate the Englishness of the English, whether in its absurdity as Monty Python, or Fry and Laurie have done, or in its farcicality as French and Saunders, or the League of Gentlemen, to name but a few, do so well. Here, there is no reverence for the greatness of the oddness that is Englishness. The Cooper siblings move away from that cult of particularism to strike straight at the heart of the universal human condition.
In this way, they subliminally burst the Brexit bubble. For, whilst they seemingly showcase the jewel in the crown of the very idea of England: its green fields, its thatched houses, its Cotswold of pride and glory, what they show is a wasteland, both physical and mental. All the extraordinary secondary characters in the show, from Len, the old curmudgeon hoarder who has to move out of his house because he has got nowhere left to stand, to crazy terrifying Mandy, to disfigured mute Griff, are all figures of human wreckage, tottering on the verge of despair, and yet they all go on, living out a will to live they are not aware of possessing, accepting their lot without consent but out of duty to an unquestioned fatality.
Kerry and Kurtan’s idiosyncratic vegetative drifting captures a universal aspect of humanity, which is, as such, not alien to life on a Chekhovian country estate nor to Flaubertian ‘Bovarism’, that is, the self-deceiving state which feeds to surfeit on its own delusions of heroism.
Where the Bovarism of Flaubert’s famous heroine Madame Bovary, (who gives her name to the condition) takes her down a tragic path, the same condition takes her brothers from a different novel but same author, Bouvard and Pécuchet down a path of bombastic ridicule.
Kerry and Kurtan are the 21st century echoes of Bouvard and Pécuchet, the Cotswold is their Normandy village, and the Frenchmen’s project to list every bit of knowledge ever produced is paralleled in This Country with the dauntless accumulation, day after day, of new hair-brained schemes, involving burying carps, wrestling in the garden, duck races or scare-crow competitions.
What Chechov’s plays have in common with Flaubert’s duo of enterprising fools, Bouvard and Pécuchet (from his eponymous novel), and what both in turn, have in common with the bemused dimwits of This Country, is first and foremost the country setting. But is it just a setting?
From all three perspectives, the country is in fact the heart of the matter, it is a character in itself which looms larger than life, being at the same time the protector and the jailer of the characters.
When Kurtan asks a visitor from the big city (Bristol): ‘what is the real world actually like? Bristol, I mean, is it all fast and everything?’, he is joining in the century-old chorus of the Modern Era epitomised by Chechov’s three sisters yearning for Moscow from their provincial back-of-beyond. But at the same time, he is also testing the solidity of the country, his country, this country’s protective walls, safely guarding his fantasies and the space to live them out.
The old proverb that the king of the pond is the lowliest urchin in the ocean is doubled up, in these works about sublimation, by the country’s capacity for tolerating, on the long term, the self-delusions of its inhabitants.
In the country, eccentricities, tomfoolery and most of all, failure are protected and smoothened out by a placid fatalism. However desperate, hollow, mad and maddening you are, life goes on, simply. The sun sets, the sun rises, and all starts again.
Such is Sonia’s unforgettable ode to tedium at the end of Uncle Vanya: ‘What can we do? We must live our lives. We shall live, Uncle Vanya, we shall live through the long procession of days before us, and through the long evenings…’
Her tirade immortalises the catch-phrase whose Russian original has become famous in itself, ‘nado delo delat’, also because, like all Russian formulae, it is in fact untranslatable: ‘we must live out the life we must live out’. A formula in which the passivity of fatalism meets the activity of obligation: obligation to nature to live out what nature has given us to live.
In Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, the two heroes voluntarily isolate themselves in a Normandy village in order to ‘devote themselves to their task’ – another possible translation for ‘nado delo delat’ – a task which is as absurd as the human condition, producing a catalog of everything, an encyclopedia of all there is, which soon turns into a catalog of stupid nothings compiled by two idiots.
It is in the countryside that doing nothing is still a doing, an activity, the activity of living, and so it is in works representing life in the country that the activity of doing nothing can be properly analysed, mocked and then, in our heart of hearts, commiserated with.
Each and every episode of This Country is a joy – it could not be otherwise since they are all the same if a little different. But one episode encapsulates them all. It is the last episode of season one, when Kurtan, encouraged to do so by the vicar – the only benevolent voice of reason in the village and therefore the one character Kerry and Kurtan are drawn to and are obsessed with throughout, though they do not understand why – has applied and been accepted to Swindon University for a course in health and social services (sic!). The joy and bewildered surprise etched on Kurtan’s face when he receives the news conveys, more than any words could, the abyss of past rejections and humiliations which have moulded his character. But it is the way Kerry receives the news which produces a confrontation that reveals the deep philosophy of This Country.
She is unhappy at the news and says to Kurtan: ‘don’t you realise how lucky we are to do nothing? We’re all gonna die anyway, so what’s the point of doing anything?’
Kurtan resists this compelling logic at first but when he sees on the cafeteria menu of Swindon University, the word ‘pesto’ which he has never heard of, together with an arrogant look he detects on one of the students photographed for the prospectus, he soon folds to Kerry’s outlook.
We see them running and jumping in a field at sunset, howling to the skies that there’s nowhere else to be, other than here, in this country, where they are king. The sun sets on the fields and the utility poles that frame every episode with melancholy and a sense of second-rate nature.
Great comedy is about the sadness of having to live out one’s life, transforming nothing into everything, and everything to nothing. It doesn’t get much better than this.