‘Finding rubbish and spouting nonsense.’ That’s how Lance (Toby Jones) describes the life he and his best friend Andy (Mackenzie Crook) lead in Detectorists, the friendly and much-loved BBC sitcom that started ten years ago this month.
It is precisely this low-key charm that has led to the show’s success. The story of two detectorists (never call them metal detectors, that’s the equipment) who spend their days scanning the fields of the fictional town of Danebury is an unflashy look at the lives of two middle-aged hobbyists. Their search for something, anything, owned by a Roman, or perhaps an artifact from the Saxon ship buried somewhere nearby, is partly about devotion. But it’s also about escaping the world around them, getting away from the rabble of North Essex to enjoy a rural life alone and together.
“I consciously wanted to write something uncynical and away from the awkward ‘cringe comedy’ that was prevalent at the time,” says Crook (who also played Gareth in The Office), as he reflects on the show. He points to the fact that the series is made on the cheap and airs on BBC Four, a channel made for obsessives like Lance and Andy, as the key to the show’s slow success. “Those who found it felt like they had 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 nature was fraught with risks. In France it is described as “a wonderful little treat that only British television knows how to produce”. The German numismatic website Coins Weekly is also a fan. Detectorists couldn’t be less Hollywood, and yet the LA Times praised its “almost Shakespearean” quality. In 2018, after receiving a Bafta for his role as Lance, Jones was talking about cycling around New Orleans when two guys stopped him outside a bar to tell him: “Man, we love the detectorists!” At home, Oscar-nominated actor Carey Mulligan said she bought a detector after watching the show.
Looking back, you’ll be struck by the fact that while Detectorists is generally very funny, it’s not a sitcom that goes after the belly laughs. The action is captured at the speed of life, with long scenes directed by Crook that show little more than Lance and Andy searching for the reward they hope will change their lives. The two characters both have jobs – Andy is a temporary worker and Lance is a forklift driver – but work does not dominate their lives. You need the luxury of time to become a detectorist, something that a decade later seems as rare and valuable as precious metals.
Jones underlines this point, explaining: “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 the countryside with his best friend and chatting over a pint. It’s part of Andy and Lance’s quality of life that makes detectorists so attractive.”
The show’s exploration of relationships – the ones that work and the ones that require more time and care – is at the heart of Muddy Soul, especially when it comes to male friendship.
The first series was ahead of its time in looking at the nature of male companionship and the things men find difficult to discuss. A 2018 survey found that 27% of men had no close friends at all, while 22% of men aged 55 and over said they never see their friends. For example, it’s not hard 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 each other and trust each other and have nothing to prove,” Crook says. “The first pieces I wrote were a series of conversations between two characters in a field. They were relaxed and about nothing in particular, not about some guy’s banter in the pub, not about football, but more about struggling to answer questions about the University Challenge.
“There’s an unspoken love in their relationship,” Jones says of Andy and Lance’s bromance. “Some friends, especially 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 reflected in the scripts .”
He adds: ‘Mackenzie and I are both in long-term partnered relationships and there is a lot of difference between the ways in which romantic relationships and friendships overlap, and also how they don’t. Ultimately, they have a relationship together.”
However, it was another duo that first inspired Crook to write the show. Not a detectorist himself, he was an avid hobbyist, with Jones amusingly revealing that the coin collection on the wall of Lance’s caravan, next to the Linda Lusardi poster, was actually Crook’s.
His introduction to the world came through an episode of Time Team in which a pair of detectorists claimed to have found Viking artefacts in a field in Yorkshire. The often difficult relationship between the amateur detectorists and TV archaeologists, perhaps reflected in Detectorists through the villainous Simon & Garfunkel characters, struck him as a rich source of comedy and pathos. “There was something fishy 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 scribbles in a 1999 notebook describing a forgotten idea called The Metal Detectors (rookie mistake there). “It turns out I had been working on the idea for ten years before Time Team brought it back to the surface.”
The romantic idea that the things worthwhile in life are often right in front of you is also captured by musician and actor Johnny Flynn in the show’s stirring theme song. Flynn and Crook bonded over a mutual love of American artist Iron & Wine while starring together in Jerusalem in the West End. Crook eventually contacted Flynn and explained that he had written 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 White. Flynn agreed to write the theme tune and ultimately scored all three series.
“I decided to write a song from the treasure’s perspective,” Flynn says of his song Detectorists, which has been streamed more than 20 million times on Spotify alone. “The score all came from that song too. We always had a twinkle calling. It is that treasure that determines the fate of the characters and the song kind of wrote itself.”
Flynn did not play Detectorists at gigs for a long time, for fear of being “a one hit wonder where people came to the shows just for that song”. However, he has put it back on his set list in recent months and has also performed it in some more unlikely locations. “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 entered the earth.”
The show returned for two more series and ended with a moment that rewarded Lance and Andy’s efforts, as they discovered a treasure trove of gold coins hidden in a magpie’s nest. Crook looks back on his time filming Detectorists as nothing but rosy. “The sun always shone, the sky was always blue, everyone was smiling and I was never grumpy,” he says. Jones echoes that sentiment: “Those three summers we spent shooting felt like a vacation.”
While the demand for more Detectorists never goes away, ten years after its debut, Crook believes he is done with the show. ‘I’m not going to appoint any more detectorists, but no one has to be sad. We made just the right amount,” he says. “That said, I know Toby would like to do a live stadium tour….”
• Detectorists can be found on BBC iPlayer and Netflix