Daisy May Cooper and her brother Charlie Cooper have revealed they were left with £300,000 of debt after selling the rights to their hit sitcom This Country to ITV. The actress spoke about the ordeal on Davina McCall's Begin Again podcast this week.
No Plan B and a Risky Gamble
Reflecting on the determination she and Charlie had to get the project off the ground, Daisy said: "I think what helped us more than anything was that there was no plan B. So it was like we could just throw f*****g everything at this, and had I been working with a mortgage, I probably wouldn't have gone for it. So we had to be at that kind of rock bottom with everything else to be able to gamble like that, I suppose."
ITV had initially shown interest, with Daisy explaining: "ITV had given us a pilot on the back of these little YouTube videos that me and Charlie had done, and then once they saw the pilot that we made, that was so awful they were like, 'No', so that's when we got dropped by the production company, and we got dropped by ITV."
Phone Call and a Devastating Contract
Daisy recalled the moment ITV dropped them: "I remember getting that phone call, and Charlie just said, 'I'm going to go out for a bit'. And I remember thinking he was going to do something stupid to himself because it was the last straw, and it had been so many years, and we sacrificed everything for this."
The siblings then discovered the terms of their contract. Daisy said: "Charlie, we rang up our agent at the time, who said, 'You've signed a contract, so you can't take this idea to anyone else because if you do, you have to pay for the rights, which they have bought for something like £500.'"
"They bought the rights off of us. It was such a bad deal," she continued. "So you'd have to buy them back, and it would be £300,000. And we're just like, 'We haven't got a pot to p**s in. We can barely afford to buy tobacco just to have a rolly that day."
A Divine Connection and the BBC Rescue
Despite the bleak situation, Daisy described a turning point: "I can't explain it. It was something that's happened very few times in my life, and I wonder whether you've had this where it feels like this divine connection, this kind of spiritual… I just knew that everything was going to be okay."
She took matters into her own hands: "All I had to do was go straight to the commissioner of the BBC, and I found out his email, and I sent him the clips, and I sent him some scripts - the original script that we had done - and I said, 'I will stand outside your office; please come and talk to me'."
"He emailed back that night and said, 'Come in for a meeting,' and, bizarrely, we went in for a meeting, and the person who had just been in a meeting before us was Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who was selling Fleabag. So Fleabag and This Country got commissioned within the same hour."
Daisy added: "We said, 'We've got all this debt and he said, 'Don't worry about it; we'll pay for it, we'll sort it'. We could have just gone £300,000; that's it. We can't even have our own characters; we'd have to buy our own characters back."
