‘Finding junk and talking bollocks.” That’s how Lance (Toby Jones) describes the life he and his best mate Andy (Mackenzie Crook) live in Detectorists, the gentle and beloved BBC sitcom that began 10 years ago this month.
It’s exactly this low-key charm that has led to the show’s success. The tale of two detectorists (never call them metal detectors, that’s the equipment) spending their days scanning the fields of the fictional town of Danebury is an unflashy look at the lives of two middle-aged hobbyists. Their pursuit of something, anything, that has been held by a Roman, or perhaps an item from the Saxon ship buried somewhere in the local area, is partly about dedication. But it’s also about escaping from the world around them, taking themselves away from the rabble of north Essex to enjoy a bucolic life alone, together.
“I deliberately set out to write something uncynical and removed from the awkward ‘cringe comedy’ that was prevalent at the time,” Crook (who also played Gareth in The Office) says, as he reflects on the show. He points to the series being made cheaply and airing on BBC Four, a channel made for obsessives precisely like Lance and Andy, as being key to the show’s slow-burn success. “Those who found it felt they’d discovered something special.”
This has continued, with Detectorists’ presence on Netflix opening it up to an international audience. Many recent converts discovered the show during lockdown, when exploring the great outdoors was fraught with risk. In France, it is described as “a delicious little thing that only British television knows how to produce”. German numismatic website Coins Weekly is a fan, too. Detectorists couldn’t be less Hollywood, yet the LA Times praised its “almost Shakespearean” quality. In 2018, after collecting a Bafta for his role as Lance, Jones talked about cycling through New Orleans, when two guys stopped him outside a bar to tell him, “Man, we love the Detectorists!” Back at home, Oscar-nominated actor Carey Mulligan said she bought a detector after watching the show.
Looking back, you’re struck by the fact that, while Detectorists is routinely very funny, it’s not a sitcom chasing belly laughs. The action is captured at the speed 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. The two characters both have jobs – Andy is an agency worker and Lance a forklift truck driver – but work doesn’t dominate their lives. You need the luxury of time to be a detectorist, something that 10 years later feels about as rare and valuable as precious metals.
Jones underlines this point, explaining that, “Lance has a good life and he’s aware of that. Unlike so many people, he has the time to join a club and spend days wandering in the countryside with his best friend and to have a chat over a pint. It’s part of Andy and Lance’s quality of life that makes Detectorists so appealing.”
The show’s exploration of relationships – the ones that work and the ones that need more time and care – lies at the heart of its muddy-booted soul, particularly in terms of male friendship.
The first series was ahead of its time in looking at the nature of masculine companionship and the things men find hard to discuss. A 2018 study found that 27% of men had no close friends at all, with 22% of men aged 55 and over saying they never see their friends. It’s not hard, for example, to see how Detectorists paved the way for the similarly tender and lush Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing.
“Andy and Lance are completely comfortable in each other’s company; they need and trust each other and have nothing to prove,” says Crook. “The first bits I wrote were a series of conversations between two characters in a field. They were relaxed and about nothing in particular, not lad’s pub banter, not about football, but more about struggling to answer questions on University Challenge.”
“There is an unspoken love about their relationship,” Jones says of Andy and Lance’s bromance. “Some friends, particularly men, express their love through banter and negotiating difficulties together, but I don’t think we ever sat down and discussed how this was about male relationships – that was manifest in the scripts.”
He adds: “Mackenzie and I are both in long-term relationships with partners and there is a lot of the distinction between the ways romantic relationships and friendships overlap, and also how they don’t. At the end of the day, they’re in a relationship together.”
However, it was a different duo that first inspired Crook to write the show. He wasn’t a detectorist himself but was a keen hobbyist, with Jones amusingly letting slip that the coin collection seen on the wall of Lance’s caravan, next to the poster of Linda Lusardi, actually belonged to Crook.
His introduction to the world was through an episode of Time Team in which a pair of detectorists claimed they had found Viking artefacts in a field in Yorkshire. The often difficult relationship between the amateur detectorists and TV archaeologists, perhaps mirrored in Detectorists through the villainous Simon & Garfunkel characters, struck him as a rich source of comedy and pathos. “There was something suspicious about these guys and the feeling was 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 outlining a forgotten idea called The Metal Detectors (rookie error there). “It turns out I had been percolating the idea for a decade before Time Team brought it back to the surface.”
The romantic notion that the things worth having in life are often right in front of you is also captured by musician and actor Johnny Flynn in the show’s stirring theme tune. Flynn and Crook bonded over a mutual love of US artist Iron & Wine while starring in Jerusalem in the West End together. Crook eventually contacted Flynn and explained that he had been writing early drafts of Detectorists while listening to his music, feeling that the story in his head was similar in tone to the folk songs Flynn had recorded with his band, the Sussex Wit. Flynn agreed to write the theme tune and ended up scoring all three series.
“I decided to write a song from the perspective of the treasure,” Flynn says of his song Detectorists, which has been streamed more than 20m times on Spotify alone. “The score all sprang from that song, too. We always had a twinkle calling out. It’s that treasure that is guiding the destiny of the characters and the song kind of wrote itself.”
For a long time, Flynn wouldn’t play Detectorists at gigs, for fear of being “a one hit wonder where people were only coming to the shows for that song”. However, he has returned it to his setlist in recent months and has also performed it in some more unlikely venues. “I get a lot of requests to sing it at weddings or even funerals, which I have done on occasion. It really works with the idea of lifelong love or for someone who has gone into the earth.”
The show returned for two more series and ended with a moment that rewarded Lance and Andy’s endeavours, when they discovered a trove of gold coins stashed in a magpie’s nest. Crook looks back on his time filming Detectorists as nothing but rose-tinted. “The sun was always shining, the sky was always blue, everyone had a laugh and I was never grumpy,” he says. Jones echoes that sentiment: “Those three summers we spent shooting felt like a holiday.”
Though the demand for more Detectorists never goes away, a decade on from its debut, Crook believes he is done with the show. “I won’t be making any more Detectorists, but nobody should be sad. We made just the right amount,” he says. “Having said that, I know Toby is keen to do a live stadium tour …”
• Detectorists is on BBC iPlayer and Netflix
