I’d like to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting where Mackenzie Crook pitched Detectorists in 2014. He described it as ‘the sitcom that Thomas Hardy would have written’.
The show, written and directed by Crook, stars Crook and Toby Jones as Andy and Lance, two gentle, introspective blokes who go metal-detecting at the weekends. Up and down the furrows they walk, swaying their detectors, eyes fixed to the soil, before taking tea breaks beneath the greenwood tree, where they chat about Mastermind and share their spoils, most of which are bottle tops.
There is no canned laughter, no plot to speak of, and not a single joke about nerds. Nor is there any of Hardy’s fatalistic pessimism – but Andy and Lance have a deep connection with the land: Essex, where the non-events take place, is as mythological as Hardy’s Wessex.
Crook’s genius is to tell a story that seems to be about nothing at all but is in fact about everything. Andy and Lance might be minor characters in their own lives but to us they are romantic heroes, wielding the swords of fidelity, integrity and all-round decency. When the third season ended in 2017, it was as though something rare and precious had been lost.
Small Prophets (BBC2), Crook’s latest project, is again about life in the slow lane. We are now in a cul-de-sac in Manchester, where Michael Sleep inhabits a semi-detached which has gone to seed since the disappearance seven years earlier of his girlfriend, Clea.
The front garden, to his neighbour Clive’s irritation, has become overgrown. The house is a storage unit for Clea’s cardboard boxes which Michael won’t throw away in case she comes back.
Michael, played with exquisite grace by Pearce Quigley (also Russell in Detectorists), is a male Miss Havisham.
His living room, now locked, is a reconstruction of Clea’s family living room on Christmas Eve in 1979, her best Christmas ever. The recreation, painstakingly done from an old Polaroid snap, was to be Clea’s Christmas surprise in 2018, but she disappeared on the Severn Bridge before Michael could show her.
Filled to the rafters with grief, Michael lacks all self-pity. Stubborn and egoless, he has a good line in irony, cheering himself up at the DIY superstore where he works by explaining to a customer, while standing in front of a wall of blue buckets, that they no longer stock buckets.
His friend at work is Kacey (Lauren Patel), whose ambition is to have a part in the Australian soap opera Neighbours, regardless of the fact that Neighbours is no longer running. The store manager, played by Crook himself, sports a long, thin, greasy ponytail which he tugs as he terrorises Michael and Kacey about taking their breaks on time. Every so often, he sacks Michael, but neither man takes much notice.
After work, Michael visits his dad, Brian (Michael Palin), who is losing his memory and now in a home. Brian has turned his poky bedroom into a laboratory for his experiments and inventions. It is Brian who suggests that Michael grow homunculi in jars, because homunculi – tiny humanoids created by alchemy – can foresee the future and will reveal whether Clea is ever coming back to him.
Michael’s homunculi, the small prophets of the title, resemble transparent chess pieces and reach their spiritual maturity by resting in manure. The manure delivery does not best please Clive (Jon Pointing) next door.
The friendship between Michael and Kacey is beautiful to watch, which is why Bev, Clive’s wife (Sophie Willan), spies on them with binoculars from her bedroom window. She longs to join them as they potter about in the shed tending to their supernatural creatures, and chat by the firepit in the evening, but she can never belong to their secret world.
Clive, meanwhile, immune to Bev’s isolation, is determined to ruin Michael’s peace by reporting him to the council.
Small Prophets is every bit as mysteriously wonderful and inimitably charming as Detectorists. Crook has performed a piece of alchemy himself, turning the base metal of human loneliness into pure spun gold.
Homunculi were first described by Paracelsus in De Natura Rerum: ‘Through art they are born, and therefore art is embodied and inborn in them.’
We can imagine Crook pitching his new show as ‘the sitcom that Paracelsus would have written’.
