This Country – the Aftermath review: Bawdy, witty, cruel... Shakespeare would be proud

“Revenge is a dish best served covered in pig sh*te”. The life-affirming words of Kurtan Mucklowe, who then aborts a scheme to launch his own amateur chemical weapons attack on the local bowls club, which has sacked him as bar manager. Terry, the “old scrote” in charge, has changed the key code on the door. Kurtan was sure that this could never happen, because he did all Terry’s “digital stuff”. So Kurtan just goes home. With his pig sh*te.

This is the action highlight of This Country, a mockumentary centring on the lives of fictional cousins Kurtan and Kerry Mucklowe (writers Charlie and Daisy Cooper, real-life siblings). They are two young people marooned in a picturesque but dull Cotswolds village, their aspirations, dreams and illusions continually shredded and thwarted.

The crew has returned, after the arrest seven months ago, of Kerry and her sod of a father, Martin, for handling stolen vacuum cleaners. Kurtan’s bar job was one bit of collateral damage.

The writing is intricate, smutty, nuanced and incredibly creative. Here’s proof: “Mini cheddars are like crack to old people”; “Look at ‘em. they’re bowling like a bunch of absolute pubes out there today”; “He’s self-medicating with Stowford Press"; “the vicar is a bald nonce”; “he threatened to drown Mr Chuckles [a chinchilla] in a bucket of bleach”; “he looks like a shaved worm”; “he caught him stealing from the harvest festival table and washing his bits in the font”.

The gallery of Gloucestershire grotesques cheerfully tease one another about suicide attempts, sear, booze and plumb humanity’s very depths. Arthur, for example, an outstandingly cantankerous bowler, tells Kurtan “that he hasn’t laughed since he was in a squadron that carpet bombed Dresden. Either it was so harrowing he hasn’t laughed since, or it was the last thing that tickled him”.

This episode’s script is one of the best, consistently delivered with superb timing and captured by an extraordinary team of actors, directors and technicians. Bawdy, witty, cruel, poignant reflections of life’s pleasures and hardships... Shakespeare would be proud of them.

The most intense emotional tension is Kerry’s pathetic delusional devotion to her father, Martin, who, tries, and narrowly fails, to frame her for his criminal activities, and is in jail.

Now, away from him, she slowly realises that her dad is no hero. She, and we, find out he has been playing his new girlfriend, Sandra, and Kerry against each other. Thus, Kerry believes that Sandra beats Martin with an iron pole. Sandra thinks that Kerry is the one who cashed in her premium bonds and spent the proceeds on Nazi memorabilia, and a £100 phone bill watching Babestation.

There is a revelatory encounter between Kerry and one of Martin’s old acquaintances from a 1970s biker gang, Satan’s Fingers. The ex-Finger explains that, back in 1976, “a coachload of Donny Osmond fangirls breaks down and they were offering blowers to any biker who’d give them a backy back down to Weymouth”.

Martin gives his friend his last petrol to get him there – a noble gesture. Except that’s not her dad, but another Martin. Her dad is “a bastard, liar, cheat, thief, selfish, backstabber with no morals”.

Martin Mucklowe drove a fellow Finger to suicide by giving a “cold-hearted stuffing from behind” to his fellow biker’s girlfriend – right in front of him at the summer solstice, “looking at him as if to say ‘Whatever you love, Derek, I will take from you and shag it’”. As I say, Shakespearean.

This Country is on BBC iPlayer now; it airs on BBC One at 10.30pm on Saturday