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.
