You could, if you wanted to, chart the career of Mackenzie Crook through his haircuts. Now 54, he made his TV breakthrough as Gareth Keenan, the ghastly TA-cosplaying paper salesman with the pudding-bowl cut and the stapler fixation in The Office. In three Pirates of the Caribbean films his villainous character Ragetti wore his locks long and greasy. In Worzel Gummidge his barnet was straw. He was bald as the crazy druid Veran in the mad ancient Briton drama Britannia. And in his beloved (and multi-award-winning) metal detecting comedy Detectorists he sported a standard bloke’s chop that suited his sweet everyman character Andy perfectly.
Crook’s next BBC comedy, Small Prophets, is, Detectorists fans will be pleased to hear, very much in that show’s gentle life-affirming mould — this time with Michael Palin in the cast too. Yet, while he also writes and directs, as he did on Detectorists, he has reverted to type on the hair front — sporting a long rat’s tail to play an officious DIY store supervisor called Gordon.
Gordon is a supporting character with only a few cameo scenes, but his appearance was important to Crook, a man who is obsessive about every small detail of his work. He principally wanted Gordon to look as different from lovely Andy as possible, but there’s also something in the way Gordon constantly fondles his ghastly locks that feels so right.
The show’s hero is Michael Sleep, beautifully played by Pearce Quigley (Russell in Detectorists). He works for Gordon and lives in a modest house in a suburban Manchester cul-de-sac stuffed with boxes that belonged to his beloved partner, Clea, who mysteriously disappeared seven years previously. Michael doesn’t know why or where she went, is convinced she is alive and hits on a rather surprising way of discovering her whereabouts. During one of his many visits to the care home of his doddery old dad (a lovely turn from Palin, 82) he learns about an ancient formula for growing homunculi — mythical prophesying spirits — who might be able to tell him the answer to a question that has long been on his mind: did Clea love him?
Crook stumbled on the spell about ten years ago in a book written by the 16th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus, as you do. “It was a footnote at the bottom of one of the pages that had this account of an alchemist who had grown these creatures,” he tells me when we meet in central London. “And it was so lovely and detailed that you could believe that it could happen.”
I have interviewed Crook many times over the past 30 years and this is probably the happiest I have seen him. Small Prophets is brilliant, and Palin agrees. “I admire [Crook] as much as anyone doing television at the moment,” Palin says. “I love the skill with which he underplays things to great effect… He writes in a wonderfully quiet and very convincing way.” The two worked together previously on Worzel Gummidge, in which Palin played the mystical Green Man, the creator of scarecrows, but Small Prophets is his first major adult comedy series for decades.
Crook as Gordon in Small Prophets
VISHAL SHARMA/BBC
“It’s incredible to hear the things that he’s said [about me],” Crook says. “He doesn’t do that much acting any more, but he read the script and sort of immediately decided he wanted to do it.”
The idea for the show germinated all through his Detectorists years, he says, and grew out of his fascination with David Lynch. “My awakening to TV, the first TV that blew my mind, was Twin Peaks. And I loved that because I didn’t really understand it… there was a mystery there. Here there’s a Twin Peaks thing with a small town and something weird going on under the surface. With Detectorists, which I love, there’s never any question about what’s going on.
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“I’ve always wanted to do something just a little bit more surreal and a little bit unexplainable. I tend to do that, have a half idea and then sit on it until it matures and I realise what it is. I collect these little ideas in my notebooks and I was able in this series to sprinkle [in] a few of these magical weird happenings.”
I take slight issue with his description of Detectorists as a show where you always know “what’s going on”. There were moments of magic in that show too — the semi-miraculous appearance of gold, or those moments when Andy and Lance (Toby Jones) were looking for treasure in fields and suddenly heard the thump of horses’ hoofs on the summer breeze, I suggest.
“I never saw that as supernatural,” he counters. “It’s more just that history is around us and the ghosts of the past are around us, but they’re not the spirits of dead people.”
Crook: “I’ve always wanted to do something just a little bit more surreal”
I am slightly sad to hear this. Crook had a big role as Ginger, best friend to Mark Rylance’s Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth’s fantastically mystical play about modern rural England; and there’s a lovely trait in a lot of Crook’s work that speaks to the spooky, ancient quality of the British landscape. Jerusalem ended with the giants of England rising, after all. Has Crook ever experienced anything out of the ordinary? “No, I haven’t,” he says. “And I don’t believe in the supernatural. But I would love to. That’s one thing I’ve realised. I don’t believe in ghosts. But if I could only see one…
“I’ve listened to all of Uncanny, that [Danny Robins] podcast. And I’ve never heard anything that would convince me. So many of these ghost stories start off with ‘So I was in bed and I woke up’ and immediately I’m like, you didn’t wake up.”
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Crook lives with his wife and two children — Jude, who has just turned 23, and Scout, who is 18 — in Muswell Hill, north London, though I’ve always sensed a longing in him for rural living. He did own a wood in Essex where he used to go metal detecting, but that has been sold. The family also have a 17th-century place in Suffolk, a timber-framed farmhouse that he goes to as often as he can. Definitely no ghosts there?
“There are witch marks burnt into the beams and initials. So if there’s any place where there’s going to be a ghost, it’s there. I’ve never felt safer or more comfortable anywhere. I’ve never slept better in any place. If I saw a ghost and it was undoubtedly a ghost, I’d have to rethink everything.”
It would be easy to see much of Crook in Michael, a shy, kindly and unassuming man with a strong sense of self and purpose, but Crook demurs. “I don’t know… He’s got a shed and he’s got his interests and he’s quite happy to keep himself to himself… But I did write it very specifically for Pearce, actually.”
With Toby Jones in Detectorists
BBC/CHANNEL X/KEVIN BAKER
Michael is a gentle soul and there is a particularly moving moment later in the series with a teenage boy in a hoodie. Was this a deliberate attempt to show masculinity in a kinder light? “It’s not a very deliberate thing… to portray masculinity in a different way or in a positive way. At the risk of sounding, you know, that’s the masculinity that I know.”
His relationship with his son, Jude, a comedy writer and performer (named for Crook’s love of both the Beatles and Thomas Hardy), sounds particularly touching. They are clearly very close and have, he tells me with a chuckle, been having the same dreams lately, all about fish, in which they have to tend to creatures who seem to be multiplying. (I think Freud would probably say they are about the creative process.)
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“[I wouldn’t say] he’s a fan of my work. He loves what I do and he helps me when I’m writing and I run ideas past him. I can imagine, weirdly, him sort of following quite a similar career path to me. He’s sparking with ideas.”
His daughter, Scout (Crook also loves Harper Lee), is also a creative soul and applying to drama school. Many parents would be reluctant for their children to embark on a career in the creative industries, a notoriously tricky and competitive field. But not Crook. “I couldn’t be happier, to be honest,” he says, smiling.
“It can be difficult. You have to work really hard at it, in order for it to work, coupled with having some lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. I’m having the time of my life with my career and it’s fulfilling.”
With Ricky Gervais in The Office, Crook’s breakthrough show
BBC
He has been married to Lindsay, a former advertising executive, for 24 years and they met before he became famous. She is yet to see the new show, but she has made her mark on it, firmly vetoing his plan for an even more outlandish hairstyle for Gordon — as well as the rat’s tail he wanted to shave the top of his head for the entire shoot and go “the full Terry Nutkins”. And who can blame her? They got married while he was filming The Office and still had Gareth’s bowl cut.
He has taken up gardening at his Suffolk second home, where he has a small orchard with apples and pears and cherries, and grows artichokes and asparagus. It’s located about 30 minutes from Framlingham, where Detectorists was filmed. He still enjoys metal detecting too. It must be amazing for fellow enthusiasts to see him, I say — a bit like a football fan encountering Pelé on a Sunday morning kickabout on Hackney Marshes? “I suppose, yeah,” he says. “I mean, they do love the show. And I get lots of detectorists come and say hello.”
People are still discovering Detectorists on iPlayer, he says with a puff of pleasure. While he has had sporadic interest from US producers to remake it for an American audience along the lines of the US Office, he is pretty convinced that it wouldn’t come off. And it’s not just because Lance and Andy’s chats about University Challenge wouldn’t translate.
“There would be an equivalent to that… [but] in America it’s a different hobby. In the UK everywhere has been trodden by people, but in the US there would be civil war or colonial war sites, but it’s so spread out.”
The BBC has made him and has shown consistent faith in him (he’s plotting out series two of Small Prophets, hopefully to film this summer). Does it make him sad when the broadcaster is under attack? “Yeah, it really does… I think it’s so precious. It’s where you can make things that will have longevity and that will bed down into the consciousness of people. Whereas on other platforms they seem sort of fleeting. They come and there’s a big reaction and then they’ve gone away.
“I really feel like I found my place doing TV comedy, probably specifically for the BBC. I love working for the BBC. I don’t need much more than that, if you see what I mean. I don’t need to go to a streamer and make a much bigger thing. This feels like the scale of things that I want to do.”
Small Prophets begins on BBC2 on Feb 9 at 10pm. The whole series will be released as a box set on iPlayer