From the guy who made it big in The Office,” Mackenzie Crook, comes a wonderfully original series featuring a delightful performance from Michael Palin.
Even without the gentle folk music opening the series, we soon feel we’re in familiar territory with this tender portrait transporting us to focus on a small hamlet, with slightly isolated lives. One life belongs to Michael Sleep, played by Pearce Quigley, formerly in Detectorists— whose solitude stems from the disappearance of his partner Clea, just before Christmas, seven years ago. It could be more tragic if she simply left him, and as such Michael keeps his house as unkempt as his beard, the living room a shrine to the day she left.
Michael is not totally connected to his sadness for his existence, finding solace and pleasure working at DIY superstore where he stitches up customers with stupid, or anti-corporate answers to their queries. His existence is not one complete pall of sadness, however poetic it is. Crook himself plays Michael’s boss Gordon who wields his petty, pathetic displays of power, especially displaying his wrath when his employees take their breaks.
There are tender and affectionate visits to his father (Michael Palin in wonderful form) at his old folk’s home, where he makes Rube-Goldberg machines for his own entertainment. Turns out he knows a thing or two about supernatural beings too, and this is the show’s tilt towards magical realism with the promise Michael could be aided by homunculi– tiny jar-dwelling humans who can only ever tell the truth. Michael has more earthly concerns via Clea’s broke brother Roy (Paed Kay, typically seedy) to get his sister officially declared dead so he can get his grubby hands on Michael’s home. Meanwhile, the curiosity of neighbours Clive and Bev (Jon Pointing and Sophie Willan) could prove an issue.
The Suffolk countryside provides Crook with dignity and and beauty in the village, and church halls. SMALL PROPHETS discovers it in retail parks and overgrown suburban gardens, that same mournful melancholy punctured by moments of brilliant, absurdist humour, even the music, haunting and ethereal, twangs into your soul. This series wrings emotion from the common place and the everyday.
SMALL PROPHETS is a delightful piece of television, full of charm and warmth alongside the intrigue.
