Somewhere in the bowels of the BBC, far away from the overheated stories of serial killers and female mutilation that clamour for the audience’s attention elsewhere on British telly, there is an oasis of calm. This little patch is the fiefdom of Mackenzie Crook.
Yet Crook for me represents life as most people live it, full of mundane domestic duties and quiet pleasures. His characters are the ones you see down the pub, operating the supermarket tills, loitering in workspaces with not quite enough to do. Crook’s career was launched in one such workplace, The Office, then boosted by a run in Jerusalem alongside Mark Rylance and a stint as a wooden-eyed pirate with Johnny Depp. But it’s his forays into writing and directing for television that really mark him out as a true original.
After the sunlit rural beauty of The Detectorists, his new series, Small Prophets, invites us into the old Albion that Jerusalem flirted with, where you might bump into a Green Man or stumble across a layline. Except it’s set in an unprepossessing part of Greater Manchester in the current day. But what wonders await.
In a cul-de-sac of semi-detacheds lives a man with the appearance of a modern Gandalf, Michael Sleep (Crook regular, Pearce Quigley); his home is the eyesore of the neighbourhood, with weeds poking through every surface. His houseproud neighbour Clive (Jon Pointing, pictured bottom with Sophie Willan) hates what Michael is doing to property values locally; Clive’s lonely wife, Bev (Sophie Willan), desperately seeks Michael’s attention, but doesn’t get it. His best friend is a sparky colleague, Kacey (Lauren Patel), at the big DIY store where he hangs around giving customers the runaround with hilariously wrong information that will literally have them running around to no effect. “Buckets?” No, he tells one customer, while standing by a wallful of them, stacked to the ceiling. No, we don’t have any call for them now, good plumbing does the job nowadays.
Crook appears as his manager, Gordon (pictured right), a skinny man with a spindly ponytail down to his waist and aviator glasses that he pushes up his nose with his middle finger (a brilliantly observed gesture). He despairs of Michael, but doesn’t quite have the chutzpah to fire him. Even when Michael gets his daily call from the care home, alerting him to his dad’s latest dangerous “brainwave” or madcap invention, and he rushes over there straight away. In among the series’ luxury casting, Michael’s dad, Brian, is the most luxurious: Michael Palin (pictured below, left, with Quigley).
The storyline then veers off at an outrageously fantastical tangent, as Michael’s main preoccupation turns out to be growing homunculi in big glass jars, following an ancient formula his dad has found. These bizarre creatures, if cultivated correctly, briefly gain the power of divination and are incapable of not telling the truth. Michael needs them to establish what happened to his beloved wife Clea, who had disappeared seven years earlier, on Christmas Eve; Michael has recreated his wife’s family living room, using an old photo, complete with the exact toys and decorations strewn around it, hoping it will lure her home. Her brother Roy (Paul Kaye) still visits Michael from time to time.
This plot will zig and zag effortlessly to a close (with another season to come), throwing in Audubon’s book Birds of America and a small meteorite along the way. It does not stint on the special effects, either, providing three different homunculi that are both bizarre-looking, wholly convincing and fascinating.
It’s the humans who are so magical, though. Quigley has the range to play Bottom as well as he does Michael, a kindly but wayward man with a sharp tongue, whose satirical gestures at work are hilarious, his exploits outside work almost heroic. The scene where he serves a woman who wants “a tit-house” is a triumph. Palin’s Brian, too, displays just the right balance of competence and looniness, his care-home room tricked out like a handyman’s shed, where he devises silly gadgets Wallace might have inspired.
Crook’s way with characterisation overall is a marvel, an acute understanding of minor foibles that say a lot. The role he has written for himself is actually little more than an inadequate manager’s frenzied preoccupation with his staff’s downtime: “Have you had your break?” accounts for most of his dialogue on the shop floor, where staff find themselves being hustled off for a cuppa even though they just clocked on. Pointing’s Clive also tries to control his life, a sad neatnik who has beaten his kitchen into submission with minimal contents and greige colourways. Bev, hIs wife, gloriously ignores him. Kaye, meanwhile, is playing one of his familiar dodgy-seeming blokes, a man on the make with the air of an escaped ferret. It’s the cast of a comedy commissioner’s dreams.
Crook is also a terrific director who knows how to scale a scene for comic effect. A recurring character is Brigham (Ed Kear), the DIY store’s roly-poly carpark attendant, who spends his time cruising around on makeshift contraptions. Crook shoots most of his scenes from a long distance away, so that Brigham is a small yellow blob in a hi-vis jacket, moving at unnatural speed through the carpark with a distinctive high-pitched laugh. Crook unerringly finds great clear-voiced folky music to open and close his shows with too, Johnny Flynn last time, Cinder Well for this series
In other hands, these characters might emerge as lowlifes and grotesques, but Crook clearly loves them, and so do the actors. As do we.
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