The last time I reviewed something with Charlie Cooper in as “himself”, he, or “he”, was visiting folkloric hotspots around the British Isles as the presenter of Myth Country. I was beguiled by the impossibility of identifying where his most famous creation, Kurtan, in the brilliant, heartbreaking comedy This Country, written by Charlie and his sister Daisy May, left off and the real Cooper began. Or, if you prefer, where the real Cooper left off and Kurtan began. What were we to make of him listening with apparently genuine delight on his face to a man playing an old local tune on a recorder before announcing with perfect Kurtanish sensibility and timing that it was because: “In the wrong hands, it’s murder”? He watched with admiration as a friend with a divining rod approached and re-approached some ancient stones near – but, crucially not actually part of – the historic Avebury site of neolithic monuments. “I dread to think how long he’d be here doing that,” Cooper/Kurtan whispered to camera. “He’s light years ahead of his time.” Then a quintessentially Kurtanish worried pause. “Or light years behind his time.”
I have pondered Fractal Cooper – genius? Poet? Muppet who’s right twice a day? – in many a quiet moment since. So I welcomed the chance to dwell with him awhile again in Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s NightWatch, a slice of Halloween schedule-filler in which he and Daisy – who plays Kurtan’s more, uh, limited cousin Kerry in the sitcom – spend the night in different spooky locations in the hope of being visited by ghosts, an ambition they have shared since their Ouija board-playing games as children. And while I cannot say yet that I have the measure of the man, whose essence is perhaps as uncapturable as the spectres they seek, it becomes possible to conjecture that there are at least two threads running through both artist and invention.
