We might begin to understand the circumstances of Detectorists by asking a preliminary question:
What do these Elizabethan men have in common?
Tramps, zookeepers, sitcom characters, spies, soldiers, office workers, politicians, hotel keepers – all are united in the desperate desire for escape.
This urge, whether vaguely felt or explicitly articulated, characterises them all; and the distinctive rhythms of its unending cycle of pursuit and denial came to shape the form that characterised Elizabethan comedy: the sitcom.
Hancock's Half Hour, the programme typically considered the canonical beginning of the British sitcom, began in 1954, now almost seventy years ago. The Golden Age of English stage comedy (Lyly to Shirley, peaking with Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher) lasted some sixty years; the Silver Age (the so-called Restoration comedy, that of Dryden, Congreve and Farquhar) perhaps fifty or so.
The characters populating the Elizabethan sitcom are doubly defined, by place and role. They are typically surrounded by cynics and simpletons; the former are those brutally aware of being stuck and harbouring no illusions of escape (merely material gain); the latter those who are interminably, frustratingly, childishly, inexplicably, sublimely content with their lot, free of desire (sancta simplicitas!). In the hero’s refusal to submit to his allotted fate and pursue freedom, he elicited our sympathy, even when coloured in tones of satire, as was not infrequently the case.
Unlike his genre ancestors, however, Mackenzie Crook’s hero is not physically hemmed in. The programme’s distinctive open horizons and screen-filling skies offer a vision of freedom. Map in hand, he can hunt his quarry far and wide. We are occupying distinctly different physical and psychic territory. They are characters set free from the need (or perhaps ability) to play a role or occupy a space.
So why are they always asking themselves 'why'? ‘Why am I even doing this?’ Rarely do sitcom characters engage in such relentless self-questioning. Was the gift of freedom supposed to be like this?
The entrapment by a role has given way to a, shall we say, mood; one of unshakeable, inquisitive searching. But for what? And what do they think will happen when they’ve found it?
To assist us, we might turn to the psychoanalyst Marion Milner, who in the 1920s kept a journal for several years in which she recorded moments of happiness. The plan was to detect patterns amongst the noise that might help her (or our sitcom characters) answer the question: what do you need to be happy?
In the published book detailing her discoveries (A Life of One’s Own, 1934), she articulates something like a ‘rule’ that her experiences taught her, relating it to two ways of paying attention to the world: one narrow, one wide. The former is one where ‘you attend automatically to whatever interests you; whatever seems likely to serve your personal desires’. The latter is when we 'attend to something and yet want nothing from it', when the 'questing purposes were held in leash'.
'If by chance we should have discovered the knack of holding wide our attention, then the magic thing happens', she writes.
Detectorists dramatizes just such a quest. Its heroes seem to want nothing in particular; and this is by no means deliberate – they in fact seem not know what they want. It is only the antagonists who do know – and it’s usually money: ex-wives, property developers, rogue detectorists and energy companies all thwart the heroes’ journey.
It has been said that the real, symbolic, antagonist in any comedy is ‘the World’, against which is depicted the ‘dauntless endurance of the individual’. The only public value extant in the Elizabethan World is money, no other binding tie surviving (be it religious, civic or national).
‘Questing purposes held in leash’ is almost too good be true as a quote for a programme whose protagonists clasp a questing electromagnetic coil on a leash, probing the loamy earth for signals. The story of the sitcom, in this telling, is one whose attention has had to be widened; when it was narrow, everything was a means to an end – ‘contentment was always in the future’; its protagonists were doomed to discontent with their narrow goals: getting that promotion / the new series / ‘down to Sidcup’; becoming ‘millionaires’, etc. Crook’s wide vistas and open fields have substituted that for a mood of wider attention.
Its first ‘final’ episode (in 2017) reminded us of the need for widened attention. Their quest for Anglo-Saxon treasure (‘that one item’, in Milner’s terms) had finally eluded them, it seemed. But along the way, they had brought their club together, befriended their former enemies and saved a piece of nature: these are concrete, modest goals that would certainly not have sated any ‘questing purpose’ beforehand. They needed the illusion of treasure to guide them to achieving a very human and humane outcome.
In perhaps the most bittersweet and perfectly-pitched end to a sitcom, their vain searching of the ground finished, we hear the tinkling of gold from above as treasure rains down: the ‘magic thing’ had happened. Crook is teaching them about what they ought to be paying attention to. Recognising the mirage of satisfaction, the camera pans upwards and away, seemingly forever, inviting the audience, now in an omniscient vantage point, to imagine for themselves what contentment means, the heroes’ baffled scrabbling in the dirt obscured by the lush branches of the tree they had saved.
The most recent episode (2022) regrettably engages in too much soap opera shenanigans (lachrymose discussions over career decisions, burnt down houses, friends acting in uncharacteristic ways to generate conflict, unlikely reversals of fortune to advance the plot etc), all of which bear witness to the fading vitality of the genre, a plague to which Detectorists is sadly not immune. For all that, Crook justifies the Christmas theme of the final outing in a bravura coup de théâtre, unveiled towards the end of the episode, when the characters realise, again, they have been paying exactly the wrong kind of attention. As they trudge away from the field for the last time, together again and enjoying each other’s company, Crook’s men have perhaps learnt what their ancestors could not, how to be unsatisfied.
Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.
CS Lewis, The Day With a White Mark
Sitcoms had flirted with escape before: Peep Show and The Office both depict man outside the office, tasting the humiliation the market place has to offer them. They achieved freedom: the freedom to take their anonymous place in the service industry. The freedom to be unwanted men.
For this was the world awaiting them outside, the destiny the Elizabethans bequeathed their children. Like the treasures Andy and Lance uncover, the sitcom itself is an artefact of an old order, the relic of a former world. Man can no longer yearn eternally for release when he knows what the outside world looks like, or when he has been thrust unwillingly into it.
‘Desires are not satisfied when we have reached our goal but extinguished; that is, they are lost or abandoned in the certain knowledge that they can never be satisfied. And all that's gained from reaching the desired goal is to know this fully’, the poet Giacomo Leopardi writes gloomily in one of his journals.
Would this lead us to think that the sitcom, as traditionally conceived, is over? The desired goal has been reached (a society unburdened of all social and economic barriers) and we are lost in a world of tragic knowledge. The Elizabethan way of life and ‘way of comedy’ are over, forever. The Bronze Age of comedy draws to a close; in 2023, we are no longer Elizabethans, and its history can now be written.
We, the final offspring of the Elizabethans, have been released into a stultifying or self-destructive world of video games, social science degrees, non-jobs, gym membership, flat sharing, elective identities and elective suicide. ‘Going down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly’, we inhabit the very world our Elizabethan men spent 70 years dreaming of. Little wonder classic sitcoms are the sources of such nostalgia.
In the end, Gervais takes the opportunity of a Christmas special (and a feature film of even less merit) to give Brent his fairy-tale ending; the writers of Peep Show kept their subjects trapped in their flat, watching television till the end, truer to the comic vision.
Before them, Only Fools and Horses had paved the way by resuscitating the Trotter brothers after their own fairy-tale ending, in a series of terribly misguided episodes. The writers seemed not to know how to make their characters work in the liberated world they’d dreamt of. They had dreamt of, pictured and planned their satisfaction in such minute detail that its real incarnation had nothing to offer them. Gratification robbed by anticipation.
Crook, in the final 2017 episode, gave his hero a fairly-tale ending for his material needs (like Del Boy’s, at an auction, incidentally), although it must be remembered that in the Elizabethan world such a fantastical outcome amounts to no more than an ordinary man owning a house.
The Life of Brian (1979), a standalone cinematic pastiche of the Biblical epic (simultaneously a creative recasting of I’m All Right Jack, 1959) was literally and metaphorically the apotheosis of the sitcom format, telling the tale of a young Jew’s doomed yearning to be rid of the role of Messiahdom. Ten years later, in his last great comedic achievement, John Cleese gave his trapped man a final release in A Fish Called Wanda (1988), which closes with his repressed British barrister escaping to Rio de Janeiro to have seventeen children with a beautiful American criminal. The satisfaction of the libido is acknowledged as a fantastical chimera, as is the impossibility of following them in their aeroplane. As of 2023, Cleese is on his fourth wife.
What we’ve ended up with, in comedic terms, is periodically entertaining but ultimately mawkish faux-sitcoms, post-sitcoms (comic soap operas) like Ghosts or Derry Girls.
Ghosts has a cast of amoral Conservative MPs, repressed homosexual second world war officers and burnt witches: we soon realise that its writers are communing not with historical figures but the embodiments of their own neuroses, only in fancy dress. History exists to be lectured at by the liberated present.
Derry Girls’ finale, with its much-repeated declaration of ‘I’m a Derry girl!’, reveals it to be fundamentally at odds with the restless comic vision that the sitcom evolved to portray. Its characters are in stasis and seek only narcissistic affirmation.
Detectorists, then, is a sitcom set amidst the physical detritus of ancient kingdoms; it is a sitcom set in the social and economic ruins of the Elizabethan age; it is a sitcom that plays out in a land shorn of the religious and national illusions that gave it life; it is a sitcom struggling for meaning in the dissolution of the genre itself.
The plots of its episodes are precisely about how to deal with the trauma of release. Golden artefacts are released from the earth’s clutches, detached from history and their roots, and kept in glass cases 'to keep the curses out'.
Very few works tackle this condition head-on. Arcadia (2017), an unclassifiable film, being an imaginative, narrative-free and dreamlike weaving of archival footage, shares with Detectorists an affirmation of the vital effects of the countryside; over the course of its 80-minute nightmare, arcadian scenes of Edwardian children gambolling amongst haystacks give way to lost Elizabethan boys sniffing glue in council estates.
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips uses the themes of desire and satisfaction to offer an interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes:
‘By the end of a tragedy the tragic hero discovers that he had the wrong picture of his satisfaction… There was something he believed would satisfy him – that in the most fundamental sense he wanted, or believed he wanted – and in the pursuit of it he destroys himself, and wreaks more general havoc.’
We are witnessing the sitcom’s self-destruction after the pursuit of satisfaction.
Superficially at least, Detectorists bears as much resemblance to Enid Blyton’s immortal The Famous Five as it does to the traditional sitcom. (Treasure hunts in competition with villains, camping in the English countryside, maps & clues, the joy of being in a group with a shared purpose). Detectorists is Enid Blyton for grown-ups, we might say half-facetiously.
‘If it hasn't been forgotten, I'm not interested’, Lance explains in a telling exchange, before, in an unusually lyrical mode, muttering, as though possessed, ‘my heart has followed all my days something I cannot name…’
What has been forgotten? Historical artefacts themselves, modern man’s ability to dream of escape, anything worthy of being escaped into, man’s link to history, childhood dreams, the sitcom itself?
The programme achieves a kind of emotional fusion between memory and history; between the nostalgia for childhood and the recovery of a civilisation’s past. Its characters hear voices and the clanging of swords dying in the wind (perhaps a deliberate echo of Kipling’s The Way Through the Woods or Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale). In the gentle world he lures us into, are we beguiled by the recovery of history or of our childhood? It is impossible to tell the difference.
Detectorists, then, in some sense dramatizes the quest to recapture a time when we could be beguiled by illusions (even the illusion of escape); the quest to excavate the memory of a time before disillusion set in, when we were capable of communing with our fellows in the pursuit of a shared vision. Before society’s desires were tragically satisfied.
I will end with a return to the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, who through his poetry 'constructed a metaphysical prison from which escape is impossible', in one critic’s assessment.
In his final major poem (Ginestra) is depicted a humble broom plant, flowering amidst the ruins of an ancient city destroyed by the eruptions of Vesuvius.
Surveying the panorama of desolation, the poet pauses to land a side-swipe at the progressive Liberals of his day:
The 'magnificent and progressive fate'
of the human race
is depicted in this place.
Before continuing:
The poem then ends:
The Elizabethans ushered in this age of empty places; and we, daily, like the Italian, marvel at the magnificent and progressive fate depicted in this place. As they wander the desert, Crook's characters, heads bent, passers-by of more than one lost empire, are consoled by those flowers still rooted in the soil.
We are all the inheritors of the Elizabethans, those self-made immortals, who ‘lifted their heads in insane pride towards the stars’, leaving a legacy of destruction from which we are searching for consolation. Their every utopian fantasy (crime, energy, war, religion…) indulged, ‘wreaking a general havoc’; unsatisfied still, their scions man every organ of the British body politic, clinging desperately to a façade of technocratic common sense while ‘all around is one ruin’.
In Spike Milligan’s play The Bedsitting Room (adapted for the cinema in 1969), a character known as ‘The BBC’ wanders a post-apocalyptic Britain in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, delivering news broadcasts; a comical anachronism in a world where Mao Tse-tung now occupies 10 Downing Street, he clings on half-desperately, half-unconsciously to a vanished age. His bulletins boast that ‘The great task of burying our 40 million dead was carried out in great expediency and good will’. An image to define an age.
In this wasteland, (where history exists to be destroyed or repudiated), Crook’s band of fellows have to start from scratch, with no wider myth to weave their dreams into; together, in free association, they search the unknown, their uncertain, fragmentary connection to history just a few electromagnetic pulses. The poet imagines a kind of solidarity in suffering. The programme in question is not pitched in quite so morbid a key, but they each paint a vision of people finding new ways to live together in the ruins of the old.
In the gentle, inquisitive, nostalgic strains of Detectorists are sung a dirge worthy of a life, 70 years long, and now over. History, and future, are ‘waiting for you…’
(PS. Few, if any, of the successful female sitcoms of the period are characterised by escape. The dinner ladies, birds of a feather, and Royles; Miranda, Fleabag, Geraldine Granger and Mrs Bucket are all more or less happy with their place in society, although they may have unresolved emotional states or unmet needs. There is a possible exception for the likes of Julia in her ‘Motherland’. But this story has necessarily been one of men).
Very good article. I always felt the charm of Only Fools and Horses lay in the fact Del Boy was never more depressed than when he dreamed of escaping his meagre existence, and yet never happier than when he was behind another hairbrained scheme in order to get out.
Do you not think that Hyacinth Bucket is the female mirror image of this sitcom protagonist? Where as the Trotters often dreamt of leaving their world behind, she is driven by a burning desire to consolidate. If a vague, unobtainable and liquid nostalgia is the ultimate hope for many male protagonists, then Bucket's rejection of her lowerclass past and obsession aspirational fashion trends are the antithesis of this.