March 2020 saw the release of the final episode of the BBC Three comedy series This Country. Created by and starring sister-brother duo Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper, the show follows the exploits of cousins Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe as they attempt to stave off boredom in what is described as ‘a typical Cotswold village’. The cousins’ adventures are generally miniscule in their proportions: the first episode sees Kurtan desperate to win the village scarecrow festival, whilst a more recent episode centred on the internal politics of the parish book club. Much of the show’s charm, in fact, stems from Kerry and Kurtan’s tendency to view events which viewers might consider inconsequential as of earth-shattering significance.

In doing so, This Country implies a level of simple-mindedness to its rural protagonists. In playing this for laughs, it follows a well-trod path. From The Vicar of Dibley to Detectorists, examples of British comedians drawing on perceptions of those living in the countryside as having a narrow worldview abound. In his 1973 study of the English spatial imaginary, The Country and the City, Raymond Williams argued that this trope is a longstanding one, with representations of rural life having long oscillated between emphasising ‘peace, innocence and simple virtue’ and ‘backwardness, ignorance and limitation’. Kerry and Kurtan thus sit in a long tradition of rural characters including the mechanicals of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tolkien’s hobbits and Rowling’s Hagrid who have been portrayed as sympathetic figures yet somewhat lacking in perspective, intelligence and ambition.

On first glance, Kerry and Kurtan seem to slot neatly into such a discourse. They are both portrayed as of low intelligence and as being largely disinterested in education. In the final episode of the first series, Kurtan is accepted onto what he calls a “GNVQ” course at nearby Swindon College but soon turns the place down. There are, furthermore, few instances in which either character retains the same job between episodes, and Kerry has several run-ins with the law.

Yet, these characters are not drawn solely from stereotype. The Coopers were both raised in the Cotswolds in what they have described as “Dickensian” levels of poverty. They are also evidently proud of their connection to the area; when she collected the BAFTA for Best Female Comedy Performance in 2018, Daisy May Cooper wore a dress which imitated the red home strip of Swindon Town FC. And, while the series does occasionally adhere to dominant characterisations of rural, working-class life, it also goes to great lengths to contest the notion that either “innocence” or “ignorance” are natural traits of those living in the countryside.

The clearest example of this is found in the series of title cards which punctuate the Mucklowe’s hi-jinks in each episode. Alongside the regular direct-to-camera interviews which are a consistent feature of the series, these help to build the conceit that it is a documentary. Yet, these title cards are rarely used to elicit further laughter. Instead, they are primarily used to provide a distinctly politicised context to Kerry and Kurtan’s lives.

The most wide-ranging of these came in an extended episode, The Aftermath, aired in October 2018. The card told viewers that ‘British villages continue to face a variety of socio-economic pressures. As jobs and services are eroded, the social fabric can break down’. Elsewhere, they are more specific, pointing to barriers to education and employment opportunities, sparse healthcare coverage, strained police resources and other manners in which a decade of austerity measures have impacted on rural life.

This device of interspersing comedic action with informative captions is borrowed from the theatre, in particular the “Epic Theatre” form popularised by Bertolt Brecht. Brecht pioneered the use of placards and projections in order to invoke what he called the Verfremdungseffekt or “alienation effect”. The goal of this “effect” is to encourage audiences to view the content of a performance in a more distanced, critical manner, aware not only of the interpersonal conflicts in which the characters are embroiled but also the social forces they are subjected to. The most famous use of this device in Britain was perhaps in Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s 1963 production Oh, What a Lovely War! (later adapted into a film by Richard Attenborough). The show, a retelling of the events of the First World War, counterpointed joyful, comic songs sung by clown-costumed soldiers with slides featuring distressing photographs from the conflict and a tickertape reporting the increasing casualties.

Oh, What a Lovely War! sought to puncture any notion that the slaughter of the First World War was a necessary, heroic tragedy and instead foreground the role of a ruling class hungry for power and profit in perpetuating the conflict. This Country’s title cards work to a similar end. For, the urban/rural binary described by Williams implies that “innocence” or “ignorance” are somehow innate characteristics of those living in the countryside. This Country may not dispute the presence of such attributes, but its title cards intervene to suggest that these traits are not a natural occurrence but the result of political policy.

This Country, then, may not contest dominant perceptions of the countryside as a site of “limitation”. Kerry and Kurtan’s “limitations”—their lack of education and their flirtatious relationships with employment, for instance—are central traits of both characters. Nevertheless, the title cards which interrupt the show’s action contend that these limitations are not the sole product of those living in the country, but consequences of socio-political force originating from without. They encourage viewers to view Kerry and Kurtan’s misadventures critically, in a manner that recognises that any “limitations” they may have are not innate traits, nor the product of an essential rurality, but the politically-contingent result of a state and economy which seems to have all but retreated from rural Britain.