Review: Small Prophets (BBC2)
It’s almost 9 years since the blissful Detectorists ended in 2017, and nothing since has quite matched its gentle quirks or its eye for friendships and for nature. Well, I say “nothing”: actually the reboot of Worzel Gummidge, although aimed at a younger audience, gave it a good shot. And that was also written by Mackenzie Crook – now, here he is with a new sitcom called Small Prophets, and you have to wonder if he can fool us all over again.
Yes, Small Prophets has many of the Crookian (is that a word yet?) elements familiar from Detectorists: haunting folk music (here from Cinder Well), a light melancholy, moments of humdrum absurdity, and some familiar faces. Crook himself is here, as a DIY store supervisor called Gordon (“did you take your break?”), but in the lead is the hangdog Pearce Quigley as Michael Sleep, who works in Gordon’s DIY store (dispensing tall tales more than hardware), but whose life is somewhat on hold: his partner Clea vanished mysteriously seven years ago, and every day he visits his father Brian in his care home.
Pearce Quigley, in a jarring scene
And with almost miraculous casting, Brian is played by Michael Palin: not only a physically convincing father for Michael, but a man almost everyone has a soft spot for, and as an actor absolutely loving the lo-fi surrealist turns Crook delivers here. He is slowly being obliterated by dementia, so when he claims to know how to make homunculi (tiny beings who live in jars and might know where Clea is), Michael shrugs it off; but then he finds a certain 70-year-old notebook in the garden shed.
It’s an odd turn, suddenly mixing the mundane with the magical, but it’s delivered with such humanity that, in the first episode at least, you don’t even think about resisting. In fairness, the first episode was not overly funny, if you’re looking for quick laughs – but Detectorists was a similar slow build, but was always memorable for its warmth and overall decency. Small Prophets – and so far the homunculi have not appeared – looks to be taking the same path. I’m all here for it.
