detectorists

From January 2022

31 July 1968. The first showing of a new TV show.

A field somewhere in England, early evening sunshine, the sound of birdsong. Two men in battle fatigues sweeping the ground with metal detectors.

The shorter of the two removes his headphones and calls over "Anything, Sergeant Wilson?" 

"Fuck all, Captain Mainwaring, three shotgun caps and a blakey."

They continue sweeping the ground. Mainwaring kneels down and starts to dig.

"What you got, sir?"

Mainwaring has taken off his steel rimmed spectacles to enable him to inspect his find with a small magnifying glass.

"Beer bottle top ... 1927 ... Tetleys."

"What do you do with 'em, sir?"

"Put them in this paper bag, sell them at the church fête. People buy this shit, Wilson."

"Sad tits, sir."

"You said it, Wilson."

The camera pans out and as their search continues, a stirring song Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler? plays and in a lower case san serif typeface the show's name is revealed:

dad's army

That's not of course how Dad's Army started but it is how we are introduced to Andy and Lance, the lead characters in Mackenzie Crook's comedy drama Detectorists which ran for three series from 2014 to 2017. Regular readers - I flatter myself - will be unsurprised that I did not watch the show when it was originally broadcast.

The first series was shown on BBC Four when I was living in the sticks where TV reception was patchy to say the least - BBC Four was a distant dream. I was back in Edinburgh in time for the second series but didn't have a television, in fact didn't have a sofa not that that would have prevented me from watching if I had (a) known about it and (b) had a television. I wasn't aware there had been third series until last week when I watched the whole lot in four days.

I've written before that for me the funniest 25 minutes of TV is an episode of Spaced, "Ephipanies" and there's nothing in Detectorists to change my mind on that. But Detectorists isn't an out-&-out comedy and I can't think of another TV series that is so well written, cast, acted, filmed and directed.

At the end of series 2, Lance (Toby Jones, seemingly in his element) digs one final time and uncovers a gold Saxon aestel causing him to dance with joy with Andy (Crook, ditto) and Sophie (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) grinning from ear to ear sharing in his happiness. In the hands of many directors there would have been a temptation to linger on this scene, after all the storyline has been building to this for three hours. But instead Mackenzie Crook has the camera start to pull back almost immediately after Toby Jones wipes the aestel clean of earth and within seconds the three characters are only visible as specks in the field as the closing credits roll.

It's one of many subtle touches - along with close-ups of trees, flowers, insects not out of place on Countryfile - which makes Detectorists such a pleasure to watch.

Which brings me back to why I started writing this. Primarily to kill time between breakfast and bedtime but I had also started to think how TV comedy had changed in my lifetime with the obvious reference point being Dad's Army.

Dad's Army was a British sitcom written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft about the Home Guard during the Second World War. As already noted it first aired in 1968 and ran for nine series and in total 80 episodes until 1977. It was phenomenally popular, regularly gaining audiences of 18 million. I'm pretty sure it's still shown from time to time on BBC2.

On the surface it's easy to identify differences between the two shows. One - at least to begin with - filmed in grainy black and white, the other in crisp digital colour and Dad's Army largely studio based. As fas as I can recall Dad's Army episodes were self contained ie each 30 minute epsiode "told a story". The narrative in Detectorists stretches througout the six episodes of each series (and to an extent beyond). Dad's Army also had a laughter track; Detectorists would be awful, truly awful with the sound of laughter - Rachael Stirling's laugh excepted. (The first episode of Dad's Army has a ludicrous explanatory prologue. The audience don't laugh until the title sequence and the Bud Flanagan song starts about two minutes in. I think it might just be from relief.)

But dig a little deeper you realise that the two show have much in common, and not only that Toby Jones played the part of Captain Mainwaring in the 2016 re-boot of Dad's Army.

Both are about about groups of men - and it is mostly men - obsessed with hobbies whether metal detecting or protecting the country from invasion from the forces of Nazi Germany.

It's about how they balance those hobbies with their personal lives, Andy & Becky, Sergeant Wilson & Mrs Pike. In both shows there is a wise - or not so wise - old owl: in Dad's Army there's Lance Corporal Jones who served in the Boer War, in Detectorists we have retired policeman Terry Seymour. The Dirt Sharks (Simon and Garfunkel or whatever they're called) are a almost a carbon copy of Chief Warden Hodges and the verger, the nemeses of Captain Mainwaring. And although Detectorists is set in the here-&-now, with their weekly talks held in a scout hut, using a 35mm slide projector and with refreshments in the form of Terry's wife Sheila's homemade lemonade, it does sometimes feel that we have stepped back into the 1940s. But most of all both shows are tender at heart, about friendship and common purpose.

Recently - which in my timeframe could mean anything from 2019 to yesterday - I read Mackenzie Crook talk about possibly "getting the gang together again" for a fourth series. And I know it's just work for them, but you do get the impression "the gang" had fun making that show. Always a risk coming back for more (cf. the Baker Street bank robbery, Lance Armstrong, Kevin Rowland) but I think in this case a risk well worth taking.