I'm Mackenzie Crook, and this is the 16th-century inspiration for my new comedy Small Prophets – and how we brought it to life

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

When I wrote the first series of Detectorists in 2013, I was unaware I had been sitting on the idea for the show for years, until I discovered an outline written in an old notebook from 1998. For all that time it had been slowly percolating in the back of my mind until it was ready to bubble up to the surface. My new six-part series on BBC Two had been about the same length of time in the procrastination phase, until I finally realised what the story was and how to tell it.

Small Prophets is the tale of a suburban alchemist who attempts to grow supernatural beings in his shed from instructions given to him by his elderly father. It’s a strange idea, but let me try to break down how several elements eventually came together to provide the recipe…

The Ingredients:

1. An ancient text

The seed of the idea came from a footnote in an old book about Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss philosopher and alchemist. Why I was reading this book I can’t really remember or explain, but I’m glad I did. The passage intrigued me and I squirrelled it away for future use.

It told of a mystic who had grown eight homunculi, magical spirits able to predict the future, in glass jars full of water. It described the process of how these creatures were generated (including a step where the jars were buried in a steaming heap of horse manure) and went into such precise detail that you could start to believe it might actually be true.

2. A comic master

I first met Pearce Quigley when we were both cast in a play at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which then transferred to Broadway. You might recognise Pearce as the slightly creepy, bearded Russell from Detectorists. He is about the funniest person I know but I’d never seen him in a lead role, and it was when I realised this that the whole story started to crystallise in my mind. Pearce plays Michael Sleep, the central character in Small Prophets, who I think audiences will fall instantly in love with.

3. A puppeteer

Ainslie Henderson is an animator I’ve known for over 20 years. He specialises in stop-motion animation and the films he makes are works of art. When I started to think about these mysterious creatures growing in the shed, I knew that Ainslie and his long-time collaborator, Will Anderson, were the ones I wanted to work with.

I made some sketches of how I imagined the homunculi might look and we brought them to Mackinnon & Saunders, an animation studio based in Manchester. You may know their work from films like Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!, Corpse Bride and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox. The team at M&S took my drawings, improved and developed them and built a set of incredible stop-motion puppets, breathtaking in their intricate detail. Ainslie and Will then took these puppets and, at a rate of eight seconds of footage per day, painstakingly brought them to life.

4. A musician

I love music but I don’t understand how it’s made, so I’ve always been in awe of musicians. To me they seem like alchemists, conjuring magic with their mystical instruments. One of the things audiences loved most about Detectorists was Johnny Flynn’s soundtrack – many couples have had his beautiful theme tune played as they’ve walked down the aisle. With Small Prophets I approached another favourite artist, Cinder Well, whose music has bewitched me for years. I think her specially composed theme tune, The Wise Man’s Song, will become a heartbreaking classic.

All mixed together in... the laboratory

They say, “write about what you know”. Well, this time I’ve written about where I write. Since lockdown, all my scripts have been written in a shed at the bottom of my garden. It has a desk, a work bench, tools, books, plants, an aquarium and everything I need to be comfortable and focused. It’s not a “man-cave”, there’s no calendar of saucy ladies or beer cooler (although I do have a fridge where my tortoises hibernate in the colder months), but it’s where I can concentrate on my work surrounded by all the things that inspire me, collected treasures that may have a story gestating within.

It’s also a laboratory where I cook up ideas and make props, and I decided that Michael Sleep should have a similar space to work in Small Prophets. When I took the idea to the BBC, they commissioned a short “taster”, a couple of scenes to see how the show might look and to try out the animation. In the summer of 2023, a small camera crew came to my house and we spent an enjoyable day filming in my shed.

When we came to start shooting the full series last year, the art department built a replica of my shed in a film studio in Manchester with walls that could be removed to make space for the cameras and crew. One of the only differences was that Michael has an old armchair in which he occasionally takes a nap. I couldn’t have a comfy chair in my own shed – the temptation would be too great…

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