Detectorists Christmas Special is a triumph

They’re tricky things to get right, Christmas specials. Ideally, they should capture in one perfectly judged episode the very essence of everything you found wonderful about your favourite classic sitcom, be it The Royle Family, Father Ted or Peep Show, all dusted with the lightest sprinkle of tinsel, icing sugar and nostalgia. But if they get the mix wrong – usually by overdoing the saccharine and mawkishness – it takes you straight down to Christmas hell and tarnishes your memories forever. For example, I will never, ever be able to watch Only Fools And Horses again, not even the actually funny episode where the chandelier falls down, because of an emetic, late-period Christmas special involving Del Boy, his unnecessary wife and – ugh – their new born baby.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that the Detectorists Christmas Special didn’t fall into that trap, for which much thanks, because it has been consistently one of the best sitcoms of the last ten years. If I call it ‘gentle comedy’ that might sound offputting. But that’s more or less what it is: two really quite famous actors Mackenzie Crook (the worryingly bony-faced one from The Office and Pirates of the Caribbean who looks as if he’s never had quite enough sleep) and Toby Jones (if the lead role requires a short, balding, slightly squishfaced, hugely capable and versatile actor, he always lands it) slumming it in an innocent, understated, droll series about people who go metal-detecting.

Crook, himself a lifelong detectorist, knows whereof he writes (and directs). His scripts wear his research lightly, but they invariably manage to get to the heart of everything that makes metal detecting at once so addictive and yet so painfully almost-dull. One of the main running jokes of the series is all the bits of discarded modern crap they find, for such unfortunately is the nature of metal hunting. The series makes light of this by having them unearth all manner of novelty items: once, it was an old Jim’ll Fix It Badge, which of course they chucked away; for this episode it was, inter alia, a Scooby Doo Mystery Machine replica, and an old clay cup which they didn’t really count because it wasn’t made of metal.

It’s hard to make a beguiling series about two middle aged men swinging their detectors back and forth above the soil, largely incommunicado because they’re wearing headphones. But Crook gets round it by capturing his protagonists Andy (Crook) and Lance (Jones) on one of their regular chatbreaks, usually seated on a log; or in the pub or the Scout shed where they gather with their fellow detectorists of an evening to compare finds; and by imbuing the whole with a pastoral aura, with an abundance of rustic fauna (eg hedgehogs, rather more than you see in real life these days, methinks) and flora, and bucolic Suffolk landscapes invariably shot in a golden light. There’s also that lovely folky and, yes, haunting theme song (‘Will you search through the loamy earth for me?’), by the amiable Johnny Flynn, who was almost unknown when the series began in 2014 but is now almost famous.

The Christmas special focused on the great moral dilemma faced by all detectorists: what to do if you find something totally amazing. Legally (and ethically), there’s only one option. If it’s gold or silver you have to declare it (and with luck be paid by the authorities the value of your find which you usually split 50/50 with the landowner). But once you’ve declared it, not only do you lose the prized thing which may have lain there for centuries and which once, all too briefly, was yours, but you also suddenly bring the forces of outsiderdom and officialdom into your private world. There you were, happily finding interesting stuff with your mate in your little bit of England. Now, suddenly, you’ve got the attentions of the nosyparker state and, almost worse, the archaeologists.

Archaeologists (aka beards) have an uneasy, often mutually suspicious relationship with detectorists. Andy’s problem is that he is both, generating the main source of tension in this episode, which involved the boys’ discovery of what looked suspiciously (sword pommels, bits of chain mail, etc) like the site of a Saxon/Viking battlefield. Lance (obviously) wanted to give it a few more days before mentioning it to the museum. But Andy – egged on by his slightly annoying schoolteacher wife – quite liked the idea of getting some paid work for a change, supervising a local dig.

I don’t want to ruin the episode – which you really should watch, even if you’ve never seen Detectorists before – by giving away spoilers but it abounded with all manner of treats, starting with the moment when Lance found some very old gold and ended up (though, typically, this was never overstated) behaving a bit like Gollum after he has found the Ring. There was also a delicious Holy Grail subplot, very similar to the one in Bernard Cornwell’s Grail Quest series, but none the worse for that. This was most pleasingly illustrated with a flashback sequence at the end, which imagined the artefact’s journey from 33 AD Judea (33 CE, as it BBC-ishly called it) to present day Suffolk.

This was as good as Christmas Specials ever get, pretty much perfect in fact. And Lance is dead right about tomato ketchup once it’s opened: of COURSE you keep it in the cupboard, not in the fridge which is something only psychopaths do.