A Quest for Gold

I ‘m late to the party, but, at a friend’s suggestion, I recently watched Detectorists, a BBC Four comedy that ran for three seasons between 2014 and 2022. Created, written, and directed by Mackenzie Crook (who appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean and the English Office), it follows members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club (DMDC), especially Andy Stone (Crook) and Lance Stater (Toby Jones). 

As you might guess, obsessive metal detectorists are a little hapless, a little pathetic. Andy is supported by his live-in girlfriend, Becky (Rachael Stirling), while he works temp jobs and pursues a never-ending archaeology degree. Lance drives a forklift at a wholesale vegetable company while he fawns over his ex, Maggie (Lucy Benjamin), who left him for the manager of the local Pizza Hut and sells spiritualist paraphernalia at a village shop. At meetings of the DMDC, the tiny band of enthusiasts compare their meager finds, plan rallies, and listen to presentations like the one on buttons from club president Terry Seymour (Gerard Horan), which ends with, “Though occasionally a button will turn up with some sort of decoration or insignia, the majority, and I mean the vast majority, as you’ve seen from my slides, are completely featureless.” Andy and Lance are after the gold hoard of King Sexred of the East Saxons, whose ship is rumored to be buried near Danebury. What they find instead are Matchbox cars, copper nails, pull tabs from soda cans, the occasional pound coin. When Lance finds a gold coin, he dances a prospector jig and considers hanging up his detector.

Detectorists is a beautiful show. As each episode opens, Johnny Flynn’s theme song plays over wide-angle shots of Andy and Lance moving contemplatively through meadows and plowed fields, rhythmically swinging their detectors over the ground, along with close-ups of birds perched in brambles, snails on dewy leaves, butterflies flitting over litter. Crook’s camera also makes the comedy work. At crucial moments, the camera takes in reactions rather than actions, which pulls us closer to the characters, so we find humor in them rather than in antics. When two members of the DMDC, Russell (Pearce Quigley) and Hugh (Divian Ladwa), stumble on a hook-up spot in the woods, we don’t see what the couples (or triples or quads) are up to, but watch confusion and disgust spread over Russell and Hugh’s faces, ending with Russell’s “She’ll catch her death.” Imagine the camera pointed the other way, and it turns into a smutty scene from a National Lampoon movie. 

The comedy is understated, situational, verging toward corny. “I always said you should do something with your music,” Maggie tells Lance when he invites her to a gig where he’ll be performing. “I used to love it when you played your mandolin. It reminded me of Kermit.” “Kermit plays a banjo,” Lance answers. Later, Lance tells Andy he’s going to cancel the gig:

“I’ve run into a problem. I can’t stand up.” 
“Yes you can, I’ve seen you.” 
“No, I can’t stand up and play the mandolin . . . I’ve practiced too long sitting cross-legged on the floor.”

In one episode, Lance unwittingly drinks a slug of Becky’s breast milk from a baby bottle, thinking it’s formula. No one says “Lance! That’s breast milk.” There’s no laugh track to alert us to Something-Funny-Going-On. Instead, we (again) see the appalled and amused reactions of other characters. The detectorists get funnier the better you get to know them.

It would be easy to mock the whole crew. Crook doesn’t. He handles them with extraordinary gentleness. Everyone’s quirky, but few are sitcom-cliché quirky. They’re human, with lives full of the quiet drama of the ordinary—friendship’s delights and challenges, love and betrayal and misunderstanding, rivalry, small ambitions, the hope that keeps one searching for a hidden Saxon hoard. Becky jokes that Lance is Andy’s boyfriend, and she’s not wrong. What takes them out to the fields isn’t just the gold, but lunch or tea under a magnificent old oak, chatting about University Challenge, detectorists they’ve known (Bob Cromer, killed by lightning). Detecting becomes a metaphor for the quests of life—for purpose, happiness, love (“I found my gold,” Andy tells Becky when he finally proposes). Flynn’s theme song gives it away:

Will you search the loamy earth for me?
Climb through the briar and bramble?
I’ll be your treasure
I felt the touch of the kings
And the breath of the wind
I knew the call of all the song birds
They sang all the wrong words
I’m waiting for you
I’m waiting for you

Treasure’s out there, sometimes right on the surface. You only need to recognize it when you find it.