Small Prophets

Created, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook

BBC iPlayer, 2026

Review by Nou Ra

Small Prophets is Mackenzie Crook’s latest offering of gentle, brilliantly witty television. Crook is most recognised as the character of Gareth from the UK version of The Office, but it was with The Detectorists (2014) that his talents for creating, writing and directing came to the fore. In his second original production, Small Prophets, his wry British sense of humour persists but is also combined with elements of fantasy and magical realism to great effect.

Small Prophets follows the story of a middle-aged man, Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley: Russell in The Detectorists), on his quest to find out what happened to his girlfriend Clea, who disappeared seven years ago. Michael is aided by his elderly father Brian, wonderfully portrayed by Michael Palin. Brian tells Michael of the homunculi that he discovered many decades previously whilst travelling in Egypt. Brian explains that the homunculi are ‘Prophesying Spirits’ who can help him find out the truth about his partner’s disappearance.

Crook got the idea from a biography of the 16th Century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, The Life and the Doctrines of Paracelsus by Franz Hartmann, in which the alchemist claims to have grown homunculi himself. Crook says it was a story he stumbled upon, which took ten years to come to fruition before, luckily for us, Small Prophets was born.

The prophets are grown as per a recipe in one of his father’s old books, needing big jars, various ingredients, and a stint underground in a pile of manure. This brings a lot of stress to Michael’s next-door neighbours Cliff and Bev (Jon Pointing and Sophie Willan), who have to put up with his garden’s general clutter, untidiness and overgrown hedges. Crook says about the location: ‘I wanted a really beautiful, peaceful cul-de-sac to bring chaos to.’ Set in and around the Greater Manchester area, the sets are all real places that bring a very British charm to the show. The cast are mostly northern natives, including Michael’s younger co-workers at the ‘Tool Box’, Kasey and Brigham (Lauren Patel and Ed Kear), creating some hilarious intergenerational interactions.

Kasey mentions that she has been watching ‘Celebrity Barrel Scrapers’ (a great metaphor for modern reality TV slop). When Michael says he doesn’t have a telly, Kasey explains: ‘They just scrape the barrels out, get them clean, [it] gets really messy, it’s dead good. Hang on, you don’t have a TV?’ He replies ‘No’, and she simply responds ‘Prick!’. His lack of a TV singles him out as a free thinker.

Michael’s job at the Tool Box (similar to a B&Q store) brings the mundane to an otherwise magical story. Crook plays Gordon, the uptight manager, with a scraggly ponytail that he likes to reach behind his back and fondle, and a pair of glasses that he pushes up on his nose using his middle finger. He is a jobsworth and probably responsible for the sign on the staffroom fridge that literally just says ‘Fridge’. His main role at the store seems to be to ask people if they have had their break, seemingly without a written schedule. The highest level of magical realism in Small Prophets is that Michael still has a job: he has no respect for Gordon and even shows him the palm of his hand whilst answering his mobile phone on the shop floor, telling Gordon to shush whilst Gordon just stands there, unable to make himself and his admonishments heard.

Crook says Michael is ‘bored of his job, so he amuses himself by giving fake advice to customers’. In one hilarious scene, Michael is approached by a customer who, whilst standing in an aisle with hundreds of buckets behind him, asks if they have any buckets. Michael replies that they don’t sell buckets as there is ‘no call for them. Old-fashioned.’ Claiming everything is plumbed in and people don’t carry water, he adds: ‘A hosepipe, that’s the closest we do. Garden Section.’ Kasey also suggests to the customer that he should go to the vintage and antique emporium.

The homunculi themselves are beautiful, yet creepy-looking and have been created using stop-motion animation. Crook worked with award-winning Scottish animators Ainslie Henderson and Will Anderson for an ‘old-school analogue’ style. Crook says, ‘I think there’s so much CGI animation around at the moment that you don’t even notice it any more. No matter how spectacular it is, we’ve seen it all before, so I wanted to go old school with stop-frame animation. I think it’s nostalgic kids’ programmes we watched when we were younger – there’s just something magical about it.’ The animation makes the prophets more akin to Jason and The Argonauts or even Wallace and Gromit than, say, The Avengers’ latest offering.

Small Prophets is a beautiful, unhurried show with themes of loneliness and isolation, but it is foremost a comedy. There are moments of drama, with some mysterious characters and subplots woven together throughout. Overall, it is gentle and calm, a veritable love letter to British whimsy, and with the promise that it is ‘To be Continued’, I look forward to the next instalment of Small Prophets.

BBC iPlayer: Small Prophets