Small Prophets

What’s it about?

Small Prophets follows a man seeking answers through alchemy while navigating personal struggles, nosy neighbours, and new friends.

Starring

Pearce Quigley, Michael Palin, Lauren Patel, Mackenzie Crook, Sophie Willan, Jon Pointing, Paul Kaye, Adam Wright

An Introduction to Small Prophets

Michael Sleep (The Gentlemen‘s Pearce Quigley) lives in a quiet cul-de-sac in Manchester and his house is the one the neighbours whisper about. Weeds grow through everything, clutter fills the rooms and the man himself looks like a modern-day Gandalf who’s been told the Shire is closed for refurbishment. Seven years ago his girlfriend Clea disappeared and Michael has responded to that loss with a routine so rigid it serves as scaffolding.

Small Prophets starts here, in the gloriously dreary business of getting through a day. Michael begins his daily routine with a bowl of bland cereal, because of course he does. It’s a breakfast with the emotional range of a damp towel and he fully embraces its lack of demand.

Next comes the DIY superstore, where Michael amuses himself by covertly teasing the customers and squabbling with his manager Gordon (Detectorists‘ Mackenzie Crook), a man with a wounded dignity and decidedly out of his depth when dealing with anyone who strays from the expected norm. The store is a fluorescent cathedral of grout, buckets and garden furniture, with Michael drifting through it like a ghost who’s forgotten what he came back to haunt.

After work, Michael travels to the local care home to visit his dad, Brian (Monty Python legend Michael Palin). Then he goes back to his cluttered house and wonders about ever seeing Clea again. The empty rooms do a lot of the talking and the clutter implies a man who ceased to tidy when the world stopped making sense.

It’s the ordinary flow of all this that’s the point, and Small Prophets gives you the space to feel the loneliness under the jokes. Today, Brian talks about a mystical recipe he remembers in an old journal, and suggests that maybe this is Michael’s opportunity to discover the answers he’s been searching for. It’s an unexpected and pleasingly quaint hook, presented with enough sincerity that you feel like leaning towards the screen like a nosy neighbour at a net curtain.

Summary

Written, created and directed by Mackenzie Crook, Small Prophets is a wonderfully original and rather sweet show. The central tenet is the mysterious recipe for creating homunculi, tiny prophesying spirits that can foretell the future and reveal arcane truths. It involves rainwater, horse manure and a healthy amount of alchemy, but is this just nonsensical whimsy?

Michael harbours doubts and sets to work regardless, because seven years is quite long enough to be passively wondering. If this recipe turns out to be real, there are still no guarantees that he will even be able to summon these magical creatures and get answers.

A young colleague at the DIY store, Kacey (Waterloo Road’s Lauren Patel), likes Michael’s company and offers to help him on his mission. Their friendship grows in part because of their mutual dislike of their store manager, a bond mighty familiar to anyone who has ever worked a till. Michael’s garden shed will be alchemy ground zero and it’s going to get messy.

But the cul-de-sac is watching (there goes those net curtains again), and Bev and Clive (Alma’s Not Normal’s Sophie Willan and Sweetpea’s Jon Pointing) are dying to know what’s going on in that garden shed. They’re on a quest like a Neighbourhood Watch committee that’s finally found its calling.

Complications come in the form of Roy, Clea’s brother (After Life’s Paul Kaye). He believes his sister will not be coming back, and wants to sell the house that Michael and Clea called home as he’s financially in trouble. That puts him in direct conflict with the hope Michael has kept alive for seven years.

Small Prophets sits between kitchen-sink comedy and folklore, with the gentle pace of Mackenzie Crook’s previous offering, Detectorists, working beautifully with some surprisingly deep emotional moments among the light-hearted and daffy ones.

Check out the Series Trailer here: