by ‘Finding waste and talking smells.’ That’s how Lance (Toby Jones) describes the life he and his best friend Andy (Mackenzie Crook) live in Detectorists, the sweet and loving BBC sitcom that started 10 years ago this month .
This low-key charm is exactly what made the show successful. The story of two detectives (never called metal detectors, that’s the equipment) who spend their days scanning the fields of the fictional town of Danebury is a flawless insight into the lives of two middle-aged hobbyists. Their commitment is partly to burying anything, anything, in Roman possession, or perhaps an item from the Saxon ship somewhere in the local area. But it’s also about escaping the world around them, taking themselves out of the hustle and bustle of north Essex to enjoy a bucolic life alone, together.
“I deliberately set out to write something uncynical and removed from the ‘cringe grip’ that was prevalent at the time,” says Crook (who also played Gareth in The Office), as reflecting on the show. He points out that the series being made cheaply and broadcast on BBC Four, a channel made for obsessives just like Lance and Andy, has been central to the show’s slow burn success. “The people who found it felt like they had found something special.”
This continued, opening up the presence of Detectives on Netflix to an international audience. Many recent converts have discovered the show during the lockdown, exploring the risk-filled open highway. In France, it is described as “a delicious little thing that only British television knows how to produce”. German numismatic website Coins Weekly is also a fan. Detectives couldn’t be less Hollywood, but the LA Times praised its “almost Shakespearean” quality. In 2018, after collecting a Bafta for his role as Lance, Jones spoke about cycling through New Orleans, when two men stopped him outside a bar to say, “Man, we love the Detectives!” Back home, Oscar-nominated actress Carey Mulligan said she bought a detector after watching the show.
In retrospect, it strikes you that, while Detectives is usually very funny, it’s not a sitcom in search of belly laughs. The action is gripping at the pace of life, with long scenes directed by Crook filled with little more than Lance and Andy searching for the bounty they hope will change their lives. Both characters have jobs – Andy is an agency worker and Lance is a forklift truck driver – but work does not dominate their lives. You need the luxury of time to be a detectorist, which 10 years later feels about how rare and valuable precious metals are.
Jones emphasizes this point, explaining that, “Lance has a good life and he knows it. Unlike so many people, he has time to join a club and spend days wandering the countryside with his best friend and chatting over a pint. It’s part of Andy and Lance’s quality of life that makes Detectives so interesting.”
The show’s exploration of relationships – the ones that work and the ones that need more time and care – is at the heart of its muddy soul, especially in terms of male friendships.
The first series was ahead of its time looking at the nature of male society and the things men find difficult to discuss. A 2018 study found that 27% of men had no close friends, and 22% of men aged 55 and over said they never see their friends. It’s not hard, for example, to see how Detectives paved the way for the tender and lush Mortimer and the White House: Gone Fishing.
“Andy and Lance are comfortable in each other’s company; they trust each other and have nothing to prove,” says Crook. “The first pieces I wrote were a series of conversations between two characters in a park. They were relaxed and had nothing in particular, not about women’s bar gambling, not about football, but about struggling to answer questions on University Challenge.”
“Their relationship has an unspoken love,” Jones says of Andy and Lance’s bond. “Some friends, especially men, express their love through struggles and through negotiation difficulties together, but I don’t think we sat down and discussed how this related to male relationships – that was clear in the scripts .”
He says: “Mackenzie and I are in long-term relationships with partners and there’s a lot of distinction between the ways that romantic relationships and friendships overlap, and also how they don’t. At the end of the day, they are in a relationship together.”
However, it was a different duo that first inspired Crook to write the show. Not a detective himself but a keen hobbyist, Jones happily pretended to own the coin collection displayed on the wall of Lance’s caravan, next to a poster of Linda Lusardi, as Crook’s.
The world began with a Time Team episode in which a pair of detectives claimed to have found Norse artefacts in a field in Yorkshire. The often difficult relationship between the amateur detectives and the TV archaeologists, perhaps represented in Detectives through the guilty characters Simon & Garfunkel, struck him as a rich source of humor and pathos. “There was something suspicious about these boys and a feeling that they weren’t telling the whole truth,” he says. Later, when he came to write the second series, Crook found three pages of scribblings in a notebook from 1999 describing a forgotten idea called The Metal Detectors (rookie error there). “I seem to have been percolating the idea for ten years before Time Team brought it back to the surface.”
Musician and actor Johnny Flynn also puts the romantic notion that what’s worth having in life is worth having right in front of you in the show’s haunting theme tune. Flynn and Crook joined forces with US artist Iron & Wine while starring in Jerusalem in the West End together. Crook eventually approached Flynn and explained that he was writing the early drafts of Detectives while listening to his music, feeling that the story in his head was similar to the tone of the country songs that Flynn recorded with his band, the Sussex Wit. Flynn agreed to write the theme tune and ended up scoring all three sets.
“I decided to write a song from the store’s perspective,” says Flynn of his song Detectorists, which has been streamed more than 20m times on Spotify alone. “The whole score came from that song too. We always had twinkle calling out. It is that store that guides the fate of the characters and the type of song that he himself wrote.”
For a long time, Flynn wouldn’t play Detectives at gigs, fearing it would be “just a surprise that people were only coming to the shows for that song”. However, he has added it back to his set list in recent months and performed it in some unlikely venues. “I get a lot of requests to sing it at weddings or even funerals, which I’ve done on occasion. It really works with the idea of love for a lifetime or for someone who has passed away.”
The show returned for two more series and ended with a moment that rewarded Lance and Andy’s efforts, when they found a bunch of gold coins left in a magpie’s nest. Crook looks back on his time filming Detectives as anything but rose-tinted. “The sun was always shining, the sky was always blue, everyone was smiling and I was never gloomy,” he says. Jones echoes that sentiment: “The three summers we spent shooting felt like a vacation.”
Although the demand for more Detectives never goes away, ten years on from its debut, Crook believes he is done with the show. “I won’t be doing Detectives anymore, but nobody should be sad. We did the right thing,” he says. “Having said that, I know Toby is keen to do a live stadium tour …”
• Detectorists is on BBC iPlayer and Netflix
