Mackenzie Crook

Detectorists, TV review

Mackenzie Crook's sitcom has saved its sparkliest treasures for those who stick around to earn them.

As unobtrusive and gentle as its rural metal-detecting characters, Mackenzie Crook's BBC4 comedy has surreptitiously become indispensable viewing. The hobby-based friendship between Crook and Toby Jones's Andy and Lance may seem trite but there's a wealth of acutely observed detail and subtle humour, and the performances are finely judged.

Mackenzie Crook's series about metal-detecting buddies Lance (Toby Jones) and Andy (Crook) might reach unbearable levels of cosiness if it didn't also manage to be rather depressing, too. That's partly down to Crook's performance being so low on energy (it's actually draining to watch) and partly because, despite situational comedy thriving in little worlds, this one's just frighteningly insular and routine. This episode begins with metal-detecting club president Terry handing his mantle to an always unenthusiastic Andy.

Radio Times review

A bizarre decision by BBC4 to consign this gently beguiling sitcom to a 10pm grave. Anyone would think the channel was trying to bury it. But Mackenzie Crook's show deserves to stand the test of time, with its sly, nerdy humour and touching interactions.

This week Danebury Metal Detecting Club is looking for a new president, a wedge is driven between friends Andy and Lance, and heartache is in the air. There are nuggets of drama amid the well-staged gags (writer/star Mackenzie Crook is also doing a terrific directing job - look at the opening gag for just one example) and we're desperate to know how the series will pan out. The nervy dynamics of the pub quiz will be familiar to anyone who does them: "Round three: the Balearic Islands"!

Radio Times review

While Mackenzie Crook's nerdcom has ambled along quite happily for two episodes, this edition's walk over field and furrow is quite the happening. Disappointed that Bishop's Farm has yet to yield the kind of gleaming spoils that its potty owner has shown them, Andy and Lance focus instead on their pub's imminent folk-song open mic.

Highlights: Andy (Crook) makes a fool of himself - though not with the song that he performs with Lance; we get to see the singer of Detectorists' theme tune (it's Johnny Flynn, star of Channel 4's Scrotal Recall); and there's more hilariously childish insult-trading with rival gang the Antiqui-searchers. Best one yet.

Detectorists is what might be called a gentle comedy, if the adjective didn't imply a lack of bite and sophistication. Chronicling as it does the ordinary - even sub-ordinary - lives of metal detectorists Lance (Toby Jones) and Andy (Mackenzie Crook), it manages to capture the pathetic spite of detectorist territorial disputes ("Immature." "Are you?" "No you are.") without compromising the dignity of its main characters.

Last night Lance was thinking about getting the old band back together. "Did we have a band?" asked Andy. Apparently they did - it was called Pussy Magnet - and Lance had a new song he wanted to debut at the open mic night at the White Horse. The song itself - New Age Girl - was the perfect combination of not very good and terribly moving, not least because Lance accompanied himself on the mandolin the only way he knew how: badly, while sitting cross-legged on the floor. I rewound immediately to watch it again.

Filmed like a nature programme or a folk music documentary, Detectorists is that kind of comedy (like Silicon Valley or High Maintenance) that doesn't so much generate laughs as cumulative warmth. This week, Lance (Toby Jones) and Andy (Mackenzie Crook) are on to something in Farmer Bishop's field. While they try to play it cool, affection mounts for the details of their world: their enemies (the "beards" and "antiquisearchers"), their neat homes, and the tricks of their trade. As Andy says, "You can learn a lot from the amateurs".

Charming show Detectorists (BBC Four), is a new comedy written by, directed by, and starring Mackenzie Crook. Apart from local eccentric Larry Bishop's land, which has never been gone over with a metal detector before, it's not especially new ground. A pair of oddball middle-aged men, metal detectorists working a ploughed field, find shotgun caps, blakeys, a ringpull ('83, Tizer) and - beep beep beep beep beep - ancient history student Sophie! Circa 1990, I'd guess, certainly much younger than Lance and Andy, whose collected dreams suddenly aren't just about Saxon treasures.

We're talking nerds, and nerdy male friendship, midlife crises, all that. But it's sharp, nicely observed, good to look at, with lovely understated performances from Crook and Toby Jones.

Detectorists, BBC Four, review: 'first-rate writing'

Mackenzie Crook's BBC Four comedy has all the makings of a classic sitcom.

Mackenzie Crook's understated comedy Detectorists sees he and Toby Jones play metal detector enthusiasts whose finds rarely amount to more than a vintage biscuit wrapper ("mint Viscount, '75") or ring-pulls ("'83 Tizer"). As you might expect from an actor who graduated from The Office, there is a hint of Ricky Gervais in the writing, most notably in Jones's delusional loser Lance, but there's no cruelty. Mostly, the humour is located in boredom, though there is a good joke about Fiona Bruce and a brief turn by an agreeably eccentric farmer, who seems to have wandered in from Withnail & I.