Baftas, a baby and a big barbel. It has been a good year for the Cooper siblings. The barbel – Barbus barbus, a carp-like freshwater fish – was caught by keen angler Charlie Cooper and weighed 6kg (13lb). He shows me a photo. The baby, a girl named Pip, was had by Charlie’s older sister, Daisy May, with her fiance, and weighed 4.5kg (9lb 2oz).
Baftas weigh about 4kg each; Daisy May and Charlie won the best scripted comedy one for This Country, their satirical BBC mockumentary about (non-) life in a Cotswolds village. And Daisy May picked up another, best female comedy performance. They star in – as well as write – the show, becoming on-screen cousins Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe.
The gongs are deserved. Kerry and Kurtan, products of Daisy May and Charlie’s own souls and of a life growing up without much money and even less to do in that part of the world, are glorious comedy creations. And This Country is a beautifully observed, uniquely voiced and refreshing take on a world that is largely forgotten or ignored. As well as them it stars their real-life dad, an uncle, a mate, as well as Paul Chahidi as the vicar who has the hapless task of trying to keep them on the straight and narrow.
The show somehow manages to be dark, tender and hilarious, all at the same time.
Oh, and then Daisy May also made it on to MailOnline’s worst-dressed list, something she is just as proud of. She walked onstage to pick up her Baftas wearing a dress made from a Swindon Town football strip. She knew it would get her on the list. “I’d have been devastated if I’d worn something I thought was good and won the Mail’s worst dressed,” she laughs.
Today, she is wearing Christmas leggings from Primark. She says her brother, all in black, thinks he is more fashion-conscious, pointing out the Ralph Lauren baseball cap he has pulled down over his flaxen mop. “Five pounds, from a charity shop,” he fires back. “Helping the charity, thank you, fuck you.”
They are like that together – at each other, in a nice way. Three years apart (she is 32, he is 29), they were not especially close when they were growing up. “He was just really quiet, didn’t have much of a personality,” she says. She was “ignorant, loud and brattish … and quite funny”, Charlie says. “Our best way of communicating was always through humour.”
They only became close when they started living, and working, together. Now they finish each other’s sentences and thoughts and address each other as much as they address me, looking to each other for confirmation. Both are sunnier than their Mucklowe alter egos, more urbane if not more urban.
We are in a crowded cafe on Tottenham Court Road in central London, a world away from This Country. They are in town for meetings about a forthcoming book and afterwards they will get the train back to the Cotswolds. Charlie has just, finally, moved out of the family home in Cirencester into a rented house in the same town. Daisy May lives with her new family in a nearby village, not unlike the one in This Country. “Everyone is completely mental,” she says, then adds “in a good way”. There’s a pub, and a shop where check-out can take a while. “If you’ve got bread, they’re like: ‘Oh, are you making a sandwich with that?’ And if you’ve got Tampax, it’s like: ‘Oh, are you having your period?’”
Are they fish out of water, then, here in the capital, a pair of gasping barbels? Charlie loves London, “but on the train going back you can just feel yourself relax”. Daisy May gets stressed just crossing the road in the city. “I literally wait until the car is just there and then a voice in my head says: ‘Run!’” She is no stranger to London, having studied drama at Rada, which she hated. “Every single second of it. Because we didn’t do any comedy, it was all Shakespeare. I’m really stupid; I didn’t understand the texts,” she says. “It’s just wankers as well. I was absolutely terrified; I think I’ve still got PTSD from it. I can’t deal with any audition, even now.” Yet no one else from her year has got a Bafta.
Charlie started doing a sports science degree at Exeter University. “The only reason was because I like football. All my friends were going to uni and I thought: ‘I’ve got to do something, but I’m not academic.’ When I got there, it was like: ‘Shit, I don’t know anything’, and I left after two years.”
He came to London, stayed on the floor at his sister’s hall of residence, just around the corner from where we are now. “I remember saying to you: ‘What are you actually doing with your life?’ and you just broke down,” she says. “I’ve never seen him cry before or since. You were just broken.”
Charlie stayed on the floor for a year, worked at Topshop for a bit, walked around a lot, played the guitar and wrote what his sister describes as “the most terrible, obvious songs”. “Oh thanks. You said they were good at the time,” he replies.
Then they both went back to their parents in Cirencester, where they shared a room, a bed even. “Not in a weird way,” says Charlie, quickly. “In a there’s-only-one-bed way.” They got work as office cleaners. “It was meant to be a three-hour job; we would do it in half an hour, because we were snakes,” says Charlie. “I’d vacuum really quickly, you’d do one wipe on the tables.” They got sacked. Daisy May shows me the email from their old boss, who is actually very nice about it, thanks them for their efforts, wishes them well and offers references. Here’s a pay slip too; £185.73 net, for the month.
“We’d completely fucked it,” says Daisy May. “What happens to those kind of people that are left in villages and have got fuck all else?” They had something else: the pair were writing about what they knew, which was themselves getting left behind by life, in the sticks.
“As soon as we started we said this is definitely something, and that belief just carried us through,” says Charlie. And they had interest back. “I think because it had its own voice, and it was specific to a location in the country that hadn’t been seen much before on TV.”
Their BBC producer persuaded them that mockumentary was the right format, even though they worried that it would look like The Office only not in an office (it doesn’t help that Charlie Cooper is a dead ringer for Mackenzie Crook). But, like People Just Do Nothing, This Country breathed fresh life into the format. It got rave reviews, loads of viewers for a BBC Three show and won those Baftas. Then came the second series and a commission for a third, which will air next year. In the 2018 Radio Times list of the 100 hottest people in TV, the Coopers are at No 3, ahead of David Attenborough and Benedict Cumberbatch. “Well, I wish that showed up on my bloody bank balance,” moans Daisy May.
It is time for them to catch that train, out of the big city, back home. Well, at least it is a train, they say; it used to be a National Express coach.
The following day I have a Twitter exchange with Charlie. It seems the 6kg barbel he landed was actually caught in 2017. There were other big barbels this year though, he says, around the 5kg mark – still bigger than a baby or a Bafta, though it’s debatable which is the biggest deal. In other news: Charlie finally got a girlfriend in 2018 and passed his driving test. Now Daisy May’s having lessons: driving’s important, in the countryside. All in all, it has been a bloody good year for the Coopers.
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