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“Review: Mackenzie Crook’s latest comedy, Small Prophets, is a lot of fun.”

This very great comedy from the creator of Detectorists has a lot of wonder hidden under the surface. It’s an impossible work of art in TV production.

Before you start watching Small Prophets, the new comedy from Mackenzie Crook, the writer and director of Detectorists, try not to find out what it’s about. The best thing that occurs in this presentation full of beautiful surprises is that the most important gift is waiting to be opened. But you should know that this is everything a Detectorists fan would want from the creator’s new project: the same ideas take on strange new forms. Small Prophets is a lot of fun.

Michael (Pearce Quigley), our kind hero, lives alone in an unkempt semi-detached house at the end of a cul-de-sac in south Manchester. He woke up every day from a strange dream about birds, got his beat-up Ford Capri running, drove to his boring job on the shop floor of a DIY superstore, stopped by his dad’s nursing home for the same old conversation, and then went home to his quiet house to do it all over again the next day. This has been the case since Christmas Eve seven years ago, when his sweetheart, Clea, went missing. They located her automobile beside the Severn Bridge, but they never found her.

Courtesy of BBC.

That may be the formula for a sad, dark comedy with rainfall on windows and sugar mixed into broken cups of poor tea. But because this is a Mackenzie Crook show, there will be more to it than meets the eye. The detectorists uncovered wealth buried in the ground and hidden in the woods. Crook, on the other hand, had the tougher job of finding something genuinely amazing amid the everyday life of the city.

We quickly see that Michael has skills that would surprise anybody who thought he was just a weird old man. At first, it’s because he keeps his sanity at work by playing pranks on customers who are easy to fool. He makes up a long, funny version of the old joke about tartan paint, or he tells a man standing in front of a huge wall of bright blue buckets that the shop doesn’t sell buckets, which shows that he has a mischievous mind like his father, Brian (Michael Palin), who may not be able to remember that Clea is gone but is great at building Rube Goldberg-style marble runs.

When Brian comes up with a plan to find out the truth about Clea that can’t possibly work, Michael and his much younger coworker Kacey (their relationship is like a platonic, gender-flipped version of Harold and Maude; it’s the most beautiful friendship you’ll see on TV for a long time) are open to it. Crook then tells a story that would turn into silly nonsense in anybody else’s hands. But he always makes the correct choice, no matter how large or little.

Courtesy BBC

The casting is the most crucial thing. Crook offers Quigley, who had a supporting part in Detectorists, the main role he deserves. For Michael, the outsider whose charms are clear to those who know how to look, this is a great move. Lauren Patel, whom I’ve only seen in Waterloo Road and not much else, is amazing as the frustrated and optimistic Kacey. And what about Brian, the elderly, strange man who knows just enough? Michael Palin. That’s all I need to say.

The things that come later in the cast are also unique pleasures. Jon Pointing portrays Clive, a modern-day version of the traditional curtain-twitching neighbor who is constantly telling Michael to cut his overgrown hedge. Every time they meet, Clive ends up with his fingers on his temples, confused and outsmarted. Then there’s Crook, as Michael’s boss, Gordon, who is bossy but not very helpful. He has a ponytail that is long enough for him to reach behind his back and straighten it with greasy fingers.

What Kacey’s own unlikely dream is, what made Michael cry last, what Michael is doing in his house to keep Clea’s memory alive, and what the deal is with the moody teenager who keeps going in circles around the close, these are all solved with bursts of imagination that are very unlikely but, when spoken, make perfect sense. If there was a chest of gold up for grabs for anybody who could guess how the scene when Michael was mugged ends up, how it is completely ridiculous, then very sad, and then both at the same time, no one would be able to win it.

The message or lesson is that there are still great things in a world that may feel like it is running out of them. The presence of Small Prophets underlines the point: British TV can still make things that seem impossible, which is a reason to maintain belief in magic.

Courtesy BBC