TV Review, This Country (BBC1, BBC3): Painfully brilliant allegory for Brexit Britain

Plus: Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby (BBC2)

Big Mandy (Ashley McGuire), Lee ‘Kurtan’ Mucklowe (Charlie Cooper) and Kerry Mucklowe (Daisy Cooper) face the future (BBC)

Poor Kerry. Kerry Mucklowe, that is, one of the young people featured in This Country. Resolving to learn “how to be kind to others” after watching a YouTube video (what else?) of a “random act of kindness” involving a pensioner who gets their shopping paid for by a stranger, she goes about improving the state of the world, as they say at the Davos economic summits, but in her own village in the Cotswolds rather than the White House or Toyota City, say.

Naturally she fails, and naturally watching her do so is funny, with those dollops of bathos, poignancy and profanity that made This Country such a surprise hit, indeed the comedy hit of last year. It’s back now, for a deserved second series, and I am very, very pleased to see it.

Starring and written by real-life brother and sister team Daisy (Kerry Mucklowe) and Charlie Cooper (as Kerry’s hopeless ultra-nerdy cousin Lee “Kurtan” Mucklowe), the Mucklowes are eternally frustrated by life in their little Cotswolds village, and their inability to progress either in it or beyond it. It is a classic comedy trope – Harold Steptoe, Anthony Aloysius Hancock, Del Boy, Basil Fawlty – the frustrated figures held back only by the hand life dealt them and their utter inability to make the best of it, which of course they can never quite bring themselves to acknowledge. Instead they sublimate their ambitions in fantasies.

And so we find that even when Kerry carefully folds the ironing for her mum, this simple, random, human gesture of kindness is thrown backs at her. I can’t actually bring myself to reproduce the line in this medium, both because of its vivid scatological quality and because I fear it would fall flat in the reading, but I confess I collapsed into tears of laughter at this vision of the Mucklowe utility room. Kerry’s mum, I should add, is voiced by Daisy Cooper, and sounds possessed, and not by the Holy Ghost.

Kerry also tries, rather ineptly, to mend Kurtan’s fractured relationship with new village girlfriend Sophe (when the attempt fails she asks Sophe to leave her house, and claims that “it’s her own fault”); and also offers her services as a “hard woman” doing “security” at the village secret cinema night, patting down old biddies for knives and putting UV bulbs in the loos to thwart and “smack heads”. Yes, she is a fantasist, on top of everything.

In this run, there’s more attention on the colourful supporting figures. The vicar, the fantastically bien pensant Rev Francis Seaton, played by Paul Chahidi, acquires a son, for example. The intimidating Mad Mandy, who specialises in random acts of unkindness, acquires martial arts skills, a back story of stalking and a collection of the meerkats.com meerkats. And Michael “Slugs” Slugett (Michael Sleggs) forms a relationship of sorts with the painfully introverted Kayleigh Hudson (Celeste Dring). And, as I say, Kerry’s ma acquires an even more misanthropic edge to her presumably bed-ridden heard-but-not-seen existence.

Parts are unexpectedly bleak, as when the vicar attempts to explain to Kerry the concept of selflessness, which she first gets mixed up with selfishness and then can only comprehend the concept through likening it to saying “thank you” to the automated checkout till at Tesco’s (“the robot”) when it spews your change out. In a strange way This Country, in its delusions, suffocating insularity and cast of characters in a state of arrested development feels an awful lot like some sort of allegory for Brexit Britain.

While I’ve always well understood the attractions of dead posh hotels, and count myself lucky to have stayed in a few, at other peoples’ expense (I’m a journalist, after all), I have never really “got” the attractions of what you might call “hotel porn”, of which one of the most extreme examples is currently airing is Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby. Like car porn, property porn and porn porn, its entire function seems to be to provoke feelings of envy and resentment in those who find themselves drawn to it, and especially those who happen across the warm beauties of the Anantara Al Jabal Al Akhdar in Oman. It’s £6,000 a night for the best villa, and, I should add, worth every penny.

I don’t exactly resent having my nose rubbed into the breathtaking views, assured privacy and superb cuisine, but maybe there was a bit of a problem with the timing, having it beamed into our homes during the bitterest February in years. That, of course, and the fact that I can’t afford it or – unlike presenters Giles Coren and Monica Galetti – go there on the licence payer. I’m not leaving a tip.