Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country is, in itself, a slight thing. A professed interest in Britain’s folklore – arising during the making of This Country, the actor and writer’s near-perfect comic and devastating creation with his sister Daisy May Cooper – sees him set off in a converted AA van to investigate some of our isle’s most famous legends. The first episode takes him to Norfolk to find out about Black Shuck, a ravening giant dog with burning red eyes who has roamed the flatlands of East Anglia since the middle ages. For the second he’s in Wiltshire talking to people who believe crop circles are the work of aliens or centres of spiritual energy. In the third, he’s on the trail of King Arthur’s treasure. And so on.
It would be gentle enough fun – half-hour gobbets of talking to a pleasurable mixture of enthusiasts, eccentrics and experts – as just that. What makes it fascinating, however, what makes you unable to tear your eyes away from the screen is the increasing impossibility of pinning the real Charlie Cooper down. Is he an actor-writer turning his hand to presenting? Or is he giving us Kurtan (the hero/anti-hero/muppet co-protagonist of This Country) as a presenter? Or is he actually Kurtan and has been writing himself on to the page this whole time? The possibilities whirl and proliferate as the series goes on.
There are shades of Kurtan, for example, when “Charlie” won’t risk driving through a ford as he makes his way down a country lane in Norfolk. Or in the deadpan comment that “I watched a documentary on it” after a long explanation of dogging for the benefit of his cameraman – and in the earnest shout, when a stranger’s car draws up next to him in a deserted spot that: “I’m NOT interested, I’m sorry. I WILL get the police involved.” What should we make of the apparently genuine delight on his face as he listens to a local man play a country tune on a recorder, “Because in the wrong hands, it’s murder”? It’s a line and delivery worthy of the Coopers’ diamond-cut comedy, as is the Kurtanish disgust with which he compares his crew to that which Bear Grylls must have. “Bet they’re athletes. You’re bloody drunkards.” Then there are the throwaway lines about Daisy lightly scattered throughout (“She’s off buying protective crystals for an upcoming court case”). Where the performer/writer and the man begin and end is fabulously impossible to say.
He draws you on with that same mixture of wonder, naivete and then wit undercutting your certainty just when you begin to think that things have stabilised. In the second episode we meet a friend of … Charlie? Kurtan? Let’s just call him Fractal Cooper from now on. Scott takes him round some ancient stones (near Avebury but – entirely in keeping with the Cooperian spirit of the thing – not actually part of the famous collection) and joins him in some dowsing. Watching Scott approach and re-approach the stones with the divining rods to check on their effects, Fractal Cooper whispers to the camera: “I dread to think how long he’d be here doing that. He’s light years ahead of his time.” A surely Kurtanish worried pause. “Or light years behind his time.”
However you apportion the performance-reality, written-improvised, witting-unwitting measures that make up Myth Country, two things are clear; the programme is a joy and Cooper is a genius. Whether he or Kurtan is the myth the other is built around we may never know. But either way – a legend.
• Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country is available on BBC iPlayer.
