Call me a canker-hearted old cynic – you would, after all, be correct – but I have a tiny suspicion that Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country: Winter Solstice was thrown together in a rush after the unexpected fondness for his original three-part series on British folklore. Certainly it is more chaotic and less polished than the first episodes – even though they had what we might lovingly call a Heath Robinson-esque vibe themselves.
A large part of the original series’ charm was in the blurring between Charlie Cooper and Kurtan, the character he plays in his and his sister Daisy’s near-perfect bittersweet comedy This Country. There were lines so perfectly fitting for the latter that you became intrigued as to quite what was going on. Are Charlie and Kurtan in fact one and the same thing? Perhaps Daisy is a master puppeteer, simply dropping her brother into sets and letting the cameras roll while she improvises her Kerry lines around him? Or perhaps Charlie is simply the greatest actor since Richard Burbage, performing a seamless transformation before our very eyes?
I think Winter Solstice gives us something of the answer. There are far fewer funny lines, as if the speed at which it has been pieced together has not allowed for him to find the thin place where character and performer meet and mesh. And there are some crowbarred-in bits with Daisy, who brings him a spell book “for protection” and some Christmas presents for the one of his children that she likes. There is also a running gag with his dad about not coming for Christmas after “what happened last year” that doesn’t quite work.
Without as much humour (though there is a wonderful moment after a paean to his nan’s favourite song, David Essex’s A Winter’s Tale, when the shade of Kurtan emerges to add “Very spiteful woman, actually, my nan”), the half-hour does feel longer. But it is saved by the fact that it retains in full the other reason for Myth Country’s initial success, which is Cooper’s honest excitement for what he sees and learns.
His first stop is to witness the ancient practice of tar-barrelling in Ottery St Mary, Devon, where on 5 November every year the townsfolk run through the streets with flaming barrels of tar hoisted on their shoulders. It is a tradition centuries old, its origins lost in the mists of time; it could be something to do with Guy Fawkes, with purging the streets of evil, or with fumigating the thatch of the village cottages. Or it could have arisen from a warning given at the approach of the Spanish Armada. As with all the best folkloric traditions, there is room for all these possibilities and more.
Cooper stays to the very end (“I saw the midnight barrel!”) and is enchanted. “There was a look in their eyes by the end like they’d been somewhere ordinary people have never gone.” Later, when he is investigating morris dancing, he sidesteps all the usual mockery of what is, let’s face it, one of our more easily derided traditions, and says simply and without guile, “Looks like a pure thing, doesn’t it?” Maybe it’s the season we’re in but I almost felt tears begin to prick my eyes.
By the time he was earnestly thanking the Boss Morris group for letting him join in their winter solstice dance – “It uplifted my soul. The most connected I’ve ever been to nature” – the tears were definitely there. God bless you, Charlie/Kurtan, whichever and however much of each you are.
• Charlie Cooper’s Myth Country: Winter Solstice aired on BBC Three and is on iPlayer.
