Following the launch of new BBC Three comedy This Country, written by and starring Cirencester siblings Daisy and Charlie Cooper, Standard reporter Ryan Merrifield was offered the chance to do the pair's first-ever press interview.

THE six-part mockumentary, filmed in Northleach, centres around cousins Kerry (Daisy) and Kurtan Mucklowe (Charlie) and their lives in a fictional Cotswold village.

“The initial idea was about five years ago now, so it’s taken quite a while," said Charlie, 27.

"We’ve had a lot of ups and downs with it. We did a pilot a couple of years ago that didn’t quite work out, so we had to go back to the drawing board a few times to make sure we got it right.

"We made so many mistakes but it helped us to find what it is now," he said, admitting that The Simpsons was probably his biggest influence in terms of comedy.

Daisy and Charlie both still live in Cirencester, having been pupils at Powell's Primary School and then Deer Park.

The show, which has received plenty of praise following its release earlier this month, pokes fun at the eccentricities of living in rural England, as well as the loneliness of the youths who call it home.

“All the material is based around stuff that happens in Cirencester," said Daisy, 30. "But when we went to the channel they thought that Cirencester was a bit too big and Northleach is a smaller village, and sort of isolates the characters a bit more. Makes them more claustrophobic."

"I think living in a small town, it’s all about the smallness of everything and how because we’ve grown up here it can get quite boring because there’s nothing to do, so you're getting involved in tiny things just to keep you occupied," said Charlie.

In the second episode, 'Mandy', which became available on BBC iPlayer on Wednesday, Kurtan becomes obsessed with tracking down Robert Robinson, someone he knew from school who disappeared after two terms.

“That was based on a guy that was in Charlie’s class at Powell’s who vanished," said Daisy.

"We tried to find him on Facebook and couldn’t, and then we just became obsessed with tracking him down, and trying to find out what happened to this guy."

“A lot of the storylines you see, all of them have happened to us," said Charlie. "Stuff that we’ve seen or stuff that’s happened to our friends. We didn’t have to make anything up because it’s all here."

Daisy studied acting at London drama school RADA, and it was whilst living in the capital that the seed for the show first came about.

"Charlie got kicked out of Exeter University and I got really homesick so he came to live with me in London and we were just so homesick thinking about Cirencester and we started talking about the people that we knew from town," she said.

"It kind of developed from there" she added, with both admitting that inspiration also came from the Standard itself.

"Not necessarily any storylines directly but there was some stuff that inspired us from the Standard," said Charlie.

"When we were up in London we used to get mum to send us a copy each week," said Daisy.

"We really loved reading about this guy that had grown a pineapple in his house, which we thought was absolutely hilarious and in the future we’d definitely like to write about that."

"A whole field of them," added Charlie.

The show was written while the pair were both working as cleaners in Cirencester, earning £100 a month.

"It was just enough to scrape by to be able to write this at the same time," said Daisy, who has had small roles in TV before.

“I was in The Wrong Mans with Matt Baynton and James Corden and I was in Doc Martin with Martin Clunes," she said. "Only really tiny parts and that’s what made us start to write this, because I just wasn’t getting any auditions, it was so depressing.

"If we get a second series we’d like to do open casting for local people to get in the show because I think it’s so important to include local people and to give people around here the opportunity.

"We know how difficult it was trying to break through and getting in."

The first character created was Kerry but the show was not initially intended as a mockumentary, with that concept being added as late as last year.

Though the pair were always intended to be cousins, and not brother and sister like the actors.

“The characters are slightly heightened versions of ourselves," said Charlie.

“But we wanted them to be best mates as well. If they’re brother and sister then they have to hang around together."

“We fight a hell of a lot, all the time," admitted Daisy. "Mum’s always having to intervene but I mean we can get on to do the work.

“In one episode there’s a fight, which me and Charlie actually had about oven space," she said. "Where he wanted to cook a pizza and I wanted to cook some turkey dinosaurs and we were literally at each other’s throats, hitting each other over oven space."

Despite the back-and-forth pre-production, shooting only took three six-day weeks, with plenty of adlibbing.

“There’s more freedom and more time to film the funny stuff because you’re not having so many camera angles, you just let the cameras run," said Charlie. "So the mockumentary idea helped with that."

In the first episode the cousins tell the off-camera interviewer about how they once saw TV interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen in the village, and Daisy and Charlie admitted they'd love to see him appear if a second series is given the green light.

"I’m absolutely desperate to know if Laurence has seen it," said Daisy. “I think I’d be more star struck meeting Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen than I would meeting anybody.

“We see him in the town all the time. We used to just follow him around town.

"But we want to keep it as real as possible – so if we got Laurence, he'd be playing himself and he’d just be wondering around Northleach like he wonders around Cirencester."

And aside from Mr Llewelyn-Bowen, the pair have also recently been rubbing shoulders with plenty of other big names in the industry.

“We were invited out to a dinner with Harry Enfield and David Mitchell and other guys," said Daisy. "It was absolutely surreal being sat on a table with all these well-known comedy greats and then there’s just us two country bumpkins, sat being really star struck in the corner."

However, the only other guest star at the top of their list, besides Laurence?

Mackenzie Crook, who played Gareth Keenan in The Office.

Many viewers have pointed out how similar Charlie looks to Crook, who went on to appear in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

"We were thinking about, what would be a nice idea, would be to get Mackenzie to play Kurten’s dad, but we’ll have to see about that," said Daisy.

"In the first episode my character mentions that he does look like Gareth from The Office but it was cut," she said. "We wanted the audience to know that we acknowledged that we know he looks exactly like him.

"In fact, when we were filming somebody came up to one of the crew and said: ‘Oh, is it okay if I get Mackenzie Crook’s autograph?’"