Try not to be told about the central premise of Small Prophets, the new comedy by Detectorists writer/director Mackenzie Crook, before you dive in. In a show full of gorgeous surprises, the main thing that happens is the most precious gift waiting to be unwrapped. What you should know, though, is that this is everything a Detectorists fan would wish for in its creator’s new project: the same sensibilities take on phantasmagorical new shapes. Small Prophets is a pure, pure pleasure.
Our gentle hero is the lank-haired, long-bearded Michael (Pearce Quigley), the only occupant of an overgrown semi-detached at the dead end of a south Manchester cul-de-sac. His daily routine: waking from a strange dream about birds, coaxing his battered Ford Capri into life, driving to his boring job on the shop floor of a DIY superstore, popping to his dad’s nursing home for repetitive conversation, then returning to his silent house ready to do it all again tomorrow. It has been this way since Christmas Eve seven years ago, when his girlfriend, Clea, vanished. They found her car by the Severn Bridge, but they never found her.
That could be the recipe for a bleak sadcom, with raindrops on windows and sugar stirred into chipped mugs of weak tea. But this is a Mackenzie Crook show, so there will be wonder below the surface. The detectorists found treasure buried in the soil and nestled in the trees; here, Crook sets himself the harder task of uncovering something truly fantastic in the urban ordinary.
We soon realise that Michael has talents to confound anyone who might dismiss him as a raggedy eccentric. At first it’s in the way he stays sane at work by indulging his talent for wind-ups when he spots a gullible customer. As he improvises an elaborate variation on the old joke about tartan paint, or tells a man standing in front of a vast wall of bright blue buckets that the shop unfortunately does not sell buckets, there is evidence of a mischievous mind to match that of his father Brian (Michael Palin), who may be persistently unable to retain the information that Clea has gone, but is a whiz at constructing Rube Goldberg-style marble runs.
When Brian suggests a scheme for confirming the truth about Clea that cannot possibly work, Michael and his much younger colleague Kacey (their relationship, a sort of platonic, gender-flipped take on Harold and Maude, is the most beautiful friendship you will see on TV for many a year) open their hearts and minds to it. Crook then unspools a tale that would, in anyone else’s hands, dissolve into facile whimsy. But he makes exactly the right decision in every moment, big and small.
Most important is the casting. For Michael, the outsider whose charms are apparent to those with the sense to look, Crook takes Quigley, who was a supporting player in Detectorists, and gives him the lead role he deserves. Lauren Patel, who as far as I can see has previously appeared in Waterloo Road and not a whole lot else, is sensational as the thwarted, hopeful Kacey. And, as Brian, the old eccentric who understands just as much as he needs to? Michael Palin. Enough said.
Whiz … Michael Palin as Brian.
The creations further down the cast are singular delights too. Jon Pointing plays Clive, a millennial version of a classic curtain-twitching neighbour who keeps trying to tell Michael to trim his rambling hedge, but who ends their every encounter with fingertips on temples, bewildered and outfoxed. Then there’s Crook himself as Michael’s officious but ineffectual boss, Gordon, who has a ponytail long enough for him to reach behind his back and pull it straight with greasy fingers.
What Kacey’s own improbable dream is, what the last thing that made Michael cry was, what Michael is doing in his house to keep Clea’s memory alive, what the deal is with the sullen teenager who endlessly cycles in circles around the close – all of these are resolved with sunbursts of imagination that are fantastically unlikely and yet, when they’ve been said aloud, perfectly rational. If there were a chest of gold on offer to the viewer who could predict how the scene where Michael is mugged turns out – how it is utterly absurd, then deeply moving, then both at once – nobody would be able to claim the prize.
If there is a message or a moral, it is that there are still wonderful things at hand in a world that might seem like it is running out of them. The existence of Small Prophets proves the point: that British telly can still create impossible marvels like this is a reason to keep believing in magic.