Copyright independent
Daisy May and Charlie Cooper are indisputably the funniest sibling double act around. Their breakout mockumentary This Country, which aired on BBC Three from 2017 to 2020, was a deadpan joy, following cousins Kerry (played by Daisy May) and Kurtan (Charlie) as they meandered aimlessly around their tiny Cotswolds village, squabbling, trading jibes and eagerly anticipating the next scarecrow festival. It’s taken five years for the pair to work together again (bar Charlie’s brief cameo in his sister’s pitch-black comedy Am I Being Unreasonable?, another brilliant watch), and their big reunion project is something of a curveball for viewers. The Coopers grew up fascinated by the paranormal, an obsession fuelled by the age-inappropriate scary movies they watched together. Their new BBC Two show Nightwatch allows them to indulge in this passion, as they travel up and down the UK to “stay in some of this country’s most haunted places” overnight. Their main objective, of course, is to find some evidence of supernatural goings-on, but they’re hoping to reconnect as siblings, too, after their success has taken their careers in different directions. The opening scenes set out their brother-sister dynamic: Daisy May is painted as the flightier, perhaps more credulous one, while Charlie provides a more curmudgeonly counterpoint (“It’s just glorified gravel.” he says when she discusses her crystal collection). First on their itinerary is Gloucester Prison, a spot that’s “supposedly haunted as hell”. Charlie is hoping to see “a proper old hearty Victorian ghost” during their overnight sojourn, while Daisy May appears dead set on recreating a luxury experience in her prison bunk, rocking up with a few pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage, a Dryrobe and various bits of beauty paraphernalia. A man named Clive has been tasked with showing them around, and he seems to take a disconcerting joy in recounting exactly how many people have been hanged on the premises. Ghosts don’t tend to show up in broad daylight, though, so the spookiest thing that happens while Clive is around is a light turning off without warning, which could probably be a mild electrical fault. As the night draws in, there are more opportunities for Daisy May and Charlie to do what they do best: engage in alternately loving and disparaging sibling chat, over a pad Thai and some prawn crackers (spare a thought for the delivery driver who probably freaked out upon being summoned to a haunted prison after hours). The duo take the possibility of communing with the dead just seriously enough, grappling with the big questions of life and death with signature poker-faced wit. Why would you haunt the jail you’d been locked up in for years, if you had the choice to roam free for eternity, they ponder. As Daisy May puts it, “you’d rather haunt a Morrisons than here.” And a scene where Charlie dons a headset in an attempt to contact ghosts through radio frequency is a surreal joy, as he answers his sister’s very straightforward questions with a series of increasingly abstract words that he’s “hearing” through the white noise. The ghost-hunting feels relatively low stakes; there is none of the camp chaos or self-seriousness of an old Derek Acorah and Yvette Fielding re-run. The real fun lies in the siblings’ back-and-forth, and the way it ricochets from mockery to sincerity (when Charlie tells his sister that she “look[s] like John Smith from Pochahontas”, you can tell this back-handed compliment is some throwback to childhood afternoons in front of the telly). In fact, it’s such a delight to spend time with this pair that the show’s premise feels unimportant, irrelevant even. I would quite happily settle in to watch the two of them visiting various Post Office branches around the country, doing a trolley dash around TK Maxx or rating the nation’s garden centres (if you’re reading this, BBC, there’s plenty more where that came from). Whether or not they’ll actually encounter a “proper” ghost remains to be seen, but even when the stakes are low, letting the two of them do their thing makes for scarily good entertainment.
