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Schwanebeck, Wieland. “A Field That Is Forever England: Nostalgic Revisionism in (2014-2017).” Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century, edited by Caroline Lusin and Ralf Haekel, Narr Francke Attempto, 2019, pp. 99–117.

A Field That Is Forever England: Nostalgic Revisionism in Detectorists (2014-2017)

Wieland Schwanebeck

1. Introduction Detectorists (2014-2017) was the first TV series helmed by writer/director , and ran for three series, as well as a Christmas special, on BBC Four. Aside from a writing stint on the controversial animated show Popetown (2005), Crook had mainly been known as a supporting player on various British TV shows prior to the success of Detectorists. His most mem‐ orable role had certainly been his turn as deeply antisocial team leader Gareth Keenan on the BBC’s ground-breaking comedy series (2001-2003). While most of his co-stars on this programme quickly moved on to other projects – and co-writing and directing Ex‐ tras (2005-2007), Martin Freeman conquering both the small and the big screen with global franchises like Sherlock (2010-2017) and the Hobbit trilogy (2012-2014) – Crook’s career did not take off in quite the same way. Other than playing a minor role in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (2003-2007), he seemed to be relegated to lending his idiosyncratic features to bit-parts in everything from Paul McCartney music videos (Dance Tonight, 2007) to the occasional guest spot on British television. His few attempts at genuine starring roles were met with a mixture of critical derision and dismal box-office returns – Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004), one of the worst-re‐ viewed British screen comedies of all time, marked his personal nadir in that respect, garnering hostile reviews for its crude obscenities as much as for its alleged waste of talent.1

1 Sex Lives of the Potato Men holds a 0 % approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is regularly featured on lists compiling the worst films of all time. I.Q. Hunter ac‐ knowledges that the film is affiliated with the kind of crude sex farce that is often seen as “the quintessence of bad British cinema” (154), but he also argues for the film’s overlooked virtues as a melancholy portrayal of the crisis-ridden working class (ibid. 165-7). 100 Wieland Schwanebeck

The success of Detectorists, then, arrived practically out of nowhere. The pro‐ gramme is a deliberately understated, character-based comedy that evinced its creator’s assured handling of tone as much as his laconic sense of humour by putting the spotlight on a group of eccentric hobbyists without ever subjecting them to ridicule. The series revolves around the fictitious Danebury Metal De‐ tecting Club (DMDC), an organisation consisting of a bunch of dedicated odd‐ balls who spend their free-time (and in some cases, one suspects, all of their time) probing the fields of surrounding farmland for archaeological finds and precious metals. They are forever on the lookout for treasure and gold (symbolically and literally), never discouraged by how overwhelmingly the odds are stacked against them or by the fact that all they ever seem to dig up is ring-pulls, buttons, old biscuit-wrappers, and the occasional bit of change. Much of the screen time is dedicated to what the characters themselves refer to as “finding junk and talking bollocks” (Detectorists, S1/E5, 00:11),2 that is: the mundane activity of metal-de‐ tecting and their amusing, though ultimately banal, conversations about the pre‐ vious night’s TV schedule, domestic worries, and wildlife. Though some of these vignettes indicate that Detectorists is quite aware of the generic traditions that it is embedded in (there is the occasional nod to British landmark comedies),3 the series remains very much its own beast in terms of pace and setting. The prin‐ cipal cast of characters includes Andy (played by Crook himself), a jobless ar‐ chaeologist struggling to grow into the responsible pater familias his girlfriend Becky (Rachael ) wishes him to be; Lance (), a kind-hearted forklift-driver still reeling from a divorce, who takes delight in trivia knowledge and playing his mandolin; club president Terry (Gerard Horan), a retired police officer and author of the monograph Common Buttons of North West ; as well as their rival detectorists, ‘Simon & Garfunkel’ (Paul Casar and Simon Far‐ naby), thus nicknamed for their uncanny resemblance to the folk duo. As this brief assessment indicates, one of the dominant themes of the show is middle-aged masculinity in crisis, and while an in-depth reading of Detectorists certainly cannot turn a blind eye to how its male protagonists gently polish their metal detectors and personify them as female (S2/E2, 00:21),4 the focus of the

2 In the following, references to Detectorists will be given without repeating the title. 3 When trying to chat up a woman, Lance quotes Monty Python’s ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch (Christmas Special, 00:14), Terry’s tip-toeing around the word ‘Nazi’ evokes memories of “Don’t mention the war!” in (S1/E5, 00:10), and when Andy tries to win his girlfriend back, he feels “like I’m in a Richard Curtis film” (S1/E5, 00:08). 4 At one point, Lance explains that “a man’s detector is like his woman. […] You don’t touch another man’s detector” (S2/E2, 00:21). By the same token, he later fails to make clear to his daughter Kate (Alexa Davies) whether the ‘she’ he is referring to is his girlfriend or his car (S3/E4, 00:20). Detectorists (2014-2017) 101 following analysis will be a different one. I will contextualise the show within a tradition of British comedy that is associated with the perspective of the re‐ silient underdog, and I will show how its deliberately small-scale perspective and its paradoxical attitude towards history merge into a highly nostalgic por‐ trayal of communal spirit in the face of modernisation.

2. Humbled by History In spite of its stellar reviews, Detectorists remained relegated to its Thursday night, 10 p. m. slot on BBC Four for most of its run,5 though this has arguably contributed a lot to its niche appeal, thus resonating with the show’s themes. According to Crook himself, people who found the show ‘by accident’ felt “like they’ve discovered something for themselves and being sort of special and holding it close to their hearts” (qtd. in Lloyd). Like the archaeological gems that Andy and Lance dream of unearthing, Detectorists seems to have arrived from another era. Aimed firmly at a middle-aged audience (with hardly any character likely to appeal to a young demographic), the show affords few of the more outrageous conceits or stylistic peculiarities that the more daring brand of British TV comedy has become associated with in recent years. There is nothing deliberately edgy or cringeworthy about its humour, even though the dramatis personae is brimming with socially awkward misfits and the setting coincides with that of grotesque, black-humoured, and borderline-dystopian shows like (1999-2002, 2017). As a result, Detectorists would seem rather out of place amongst some of the most prominent and critically acclaimed British comedy exports of the last decade, like (2009-2011), Hunderby (2012-2015), Inside No. 9 (2014-), or Fleabag (2016-). Unlike any of these distinctly dark comedies, it cultivates a love for the seem‐ ingly inconspicuous and mundane, finding poetry in close-ups of flora and fauna, and this strategy also extends to the casting. The two main characters are played by series-runner Crook and by Toby Jones, one of the most reliable supporting actors in British film and television: Jones’ extensive filmography has taken in everything from independent features to Hollywood blockbusters like the series (where he voiced Dobby the Elf in two films, 2002-2010) or (2012-2015), and while he has played the occasional lead (for in‐ stance, as the meek sound engineer in Peter Strickland’s mesmerising Berberian Sound Studio [2012]), most of his signature roles have been morally ambiguous,

5 The show was moved up to Wednesday for its final series. See Hogan for an account of its ratings. 102 Wieland Schwanebeck villainous scene-stealers like the gangster Ratchett on ITV’s adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express (2010), the shady secret service boss in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), or ’ nemesis Culverton Smith in Sherlock (2017). De‐ tectorists ‘promotes’ Jones to leading-man status and supplements his dominant screen persona by emphasising his humanity and warmth; another example of how the show pushes its trademark qualities, suggesting to the viewer that it is always worth taking a second look, and that there is more to the surface than meets the eye. The critics were certainly taken with this agenda: not only did Detectorists receive praise for its “quietly joyous celebration” of “the English countryside” (Lewis) and its “sparse, droll, understated and believable” qualities (Wollaston), the show also won a BAFTA for Best Scripted Comedy (2015), while Jones took one home for Best Comedy Performance (2018). Indeed, the show’s resounding love for the mundane coincides with its not-so-subtle pride in the virtues of the quirky, insular community, a theme I shall be developing throughout the remainder of this chapter. It is not a coinci‐ dence that many of the jokes in Detectorists result from a comic strategy that has often been put forward as a quintessential feature of : ba‐ thos, that is, “the puncturing intrusion of reality that floors lofty aspirations” (Stott 55). This is most evident in the way the show, while never resorting to cruelty, constantly mines humour from belittlement, shooting the characters from bird’s-eye perspectives or reducing them to the size of ants in panoramic long shots (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Putting man in his place (S1/E1, 00:00). Detectorists (2014-2017) 103

Detectorists is clearly not afraid to ‘think small’, sending its protagonists on a Moby Dick-like search for a villainous magpie (S3/E3) or making them tie the future of the DMDC to the rather mundane question of how much is left in the club’s coffee jar (S1/E5, 00:19). The club takes pride in exhibiting its ‘finds table’, but what the detectorists view as “irresistible nuggets of history” (S2/E1, 00:11) is just a bunch of worthless buttons and buckles for the rest of the world; Russell (Pearce Quigley) makes it into the local newspaper for having retrieved a lost wedding ring yet falls short of his Ghostbusters-fuelled ambition to drive his own vehicle with the club logo emblazoned on it (S2/E1, 00:13), and it may not be laughable for Lance to purchase club fleeces for the DMDC, but the fact that he orders 150 of them for its seven members certainly is. “We could share ‘em”, he timidly suggests. “21 each?” (S1/E5, 00:22) Even when the show aims for the realm of the spectacular or creates visually inventive and cinematic set-pieces (especially in the last series), it never leaves the audience in doubt that it is absolutely content to accept the small screen as its natural habitat. In a sequence that evokes memories of the grim coda to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conver‐ sation (1974), Lance turns his flat upside down looking for a squirrel (S3/E2, 00:08), while another episode features what may be the slowest car chase ever committed to the screen (S3/E3, 00:04). Whenever the show adapts cinematic conventions that fall outside the juris‐ diction of the traditional multiple-camera sitcom, like the panoramic aerial shots, it draws attention to man’s relative insignificance, as well as to the over‐ whelming force of history. Frequent use is made of the free-floating, omniscient camera-eye, as the camera goes beyond purely character-based focalisation and pans up and down to exercise its privilege of unlimited viewpoints, very much in the spirit of omniscient narration in 18th-century literature. Series Two is full of such moments, as it plots Lance’s search for treasure in the tradition of clas‐ sical romance, where the lovers will only come together for the climactic em‐ brace.6 The series opens with a prologue set in medieval times, showing how a monk has buried the precious objects that Lance will dig up in the series finale (S2/E1, 00:00), and the camera exercises not just temporal but also spatial priv‐ ileges throughout the subsequent episodes, frequently panning beneath the de‐ tectorists’ feet to tease the audience and to reveal that the treasure, unbeknownst to Lance and Andy, is already within their reach (S2/E4, 00:01; S2/E3, 00:02).

6 The show’s catchy theme-tune makes a similar point, as singer adopts the viewpoint of the treasure itself, waiting for its lover/finder: “Will you search through the lonely earth for me, / Climb through the briar and bramble? / I’ll be your treasure / […] / I’m waiting for you”. 104 Wieland Schwanebeck

When voicing their ethos as historians and time travellers,7 Lance and Andy often appear overwhelmed by the sheer force of history and of time passing. The first gold-dig on Farmer Bishop’s land is credited to “Old Man Adam” (S1/E2, 00:26), which underlines the biblical dimension of their pastime, and Lance’s Hitchcockian musings on the conspiracy of the magpies that have ab‐ ducted ‘his’ gold (S3/E4, 00:01) may be a joke,8 but they are borne out by the series’ occasional stab at the transcendental. This is evident in what is without a doubt the most visually stunning sequence of the whole programme: when Andy blows into a falconer’s whistle he has dug up, a two-minute time-warp sequence literally summons the ghosts that still haunt the field (S3/E1, 00:25), which puts a metaphysical spin on what is otherwise a show thoroughly infa‐ tuated with materialist culture. By invoking the spectre of their forefathers (on whose ‘hallowed ground’ Andy and Lance tread), the show not only underlines the humbling dimension of metal-detecting in the face of history, but suffuses it with a thoroughly national dimension. In finally uniting Lance with ‘his’ gold in the euphoric climax of the series, the show goes beyond merely celebrating rural England’s hidden treasures and literally celebrates the nation at large. When an ecstatic Lance goes into his long-awaited ‘gold dance’, he puts the show in touch with the kind of rituals that F.R. Leavis (together with Denys Thompson) has described as the quintessence of the ‘organic community’, a thoroughly idealised version of rural England that is embodied by “[f]olk songs, folk dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft prod‐ ucts” and adjusted “to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year” (qtd. in Bilan 15).9 Lance arguably has his proudest moment when his find goes on display at the , and his own name, by being put on a plaque, becomes a

7 In the last scene of the series, Lance summarises the magic of metal-detecting thus: “[I]t is the closest you’ll get to time travel. See, archaeologists, they gather up the facts, piece the jigsaw together. Work out how we lived and find the buildings we lived in, but what we do is… it’s different. We unearth the scattered memories, mine for stories, fill in the personality. Detectorists. We’re time travellers.” (S3/E6, 00:25) See Murgia/Roberts/ Wiseman 353-5 for a more detailed account of what motivates detectorists. 8 There is an intertextual dimension to it, too: Toby Jones, who plays Lance, has appeared as in a made-for-TV movie that chronicles the making of 1963’s The Birds (The Girl, 2012). 9 If there is a fitting companion piece to Detectorists in contemporary British popular culture, it may well be ’s surrealist horror film, A Field in England (2013), starring The League of Gentlemen’s . A generic hybrid set during the English Civil War, this black-and-white oddity plays almost like a prologue to Detectorists and shows that the increasingly glorified fields of the pre-industrial world are not just the bucolic realm of the heritage industry, but that they have seen their fair share of violence and bodies buried within them. Detectorists (2014-2017) 105 footnote to the nation’s historiography. Like in Rupert Brooke’s famous sonnet, “The Soldier” (1914), he who touches the soil makes it “forever England” (v. 3), which may be why the show (which pokes gentle fun at the quirks of its charac‐ ters) never undercuts or mocks the project of metal-detecting itself. At the same time, though, Detectorists evokes strangely ahistoric, anonymous landscapes that are not so much characteristic of the realist paradigm that the show frequently references, but of the tradition of absurdism, particularly the spatio-temporal setting and character constellation of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot (1953).

3. Waiting for Gold The fundamental paradox at the heart of Detectorists is that it is a programme which celebrates history (though be it a very select, glorified version of it) and refutes it at the same time, having its characters put their heads (or rather, their metal detec‐ tors) in the sand. Lance and Andy constantly fail to see the bigger picture: blissfully unaware of the jet-planes flying over their heads (S1/E2, 00:21), of their partners’ pregnancies (a constellation that marks them out as detectorists who are rather bad at detecting), and – in one of the series’ major laugh-out-loud moments – of the fact that what they believe to be traces of a Saxon settlement is, in fact, the Google Earth watermark (S1/E1, 00:15). Other jokes result from the fact that they are sheer ob‐ livious to the passing of time: when going to a job interview, Andy puts dirt under his fingernails in order to pretend he has experience as a worker (S2/E4, 00:13), and in the same episode Lance, who frantically tries to reconnect with his grown-up daughter, gives her all the Christmas and birthday presents he owes her in the span of one afternoon (S2/E4, 00:23). This ahistorical condition overlaps with the very nature of the sitcom as a genre, where life-changing events and epic developments are much rarer to be found than in soap-operas or crime drama. This is why comedy, as a genre that is rather impervious to change, is the legitimate realm of the middle-aged man-child who is reluctant to move with and of the lad who refuses to grow up, and why it relies so much on “cyclical plots and regular settings” (Mills 34).10 The tension between changing nothing (that is, to give the audience

10 The legendary American sitcom (1989-1998) is often cited as the prime example here, its stubborn refusal to introduce epic changes coinciding with its ‘no hugging, no learning’ policy. Tellingly, Seinfeld is one of the very few sitcoms to feature a more-or-less straightforward adaptation of an absurdist drama, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978). Detectorists briefly pays homage to the show when Louise (Laura Checkley) recites “Yada, yada, yada”, a phrase very much popularised by Seinfeld. 106 Wieland Schwanebeck more of what they have grown accustomed to) and producing serial narration across several years inevitably produces some inconsistencies: Lance’s lot‐ tery-win remains curiously inconsequential,11 the character of Sophie (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) simply disappears after the second series and is never mentioned again, and the triumphant conclusion to the first series (when the DMDC absorbs some of its rivals, the ‘Antiquisearchers’) is forgotten a year later, and the number of DMDC members does not seem to have changed. The Christmas Special goes so far as to have Lance fight for cosmic balance by ‘cor‐ recting’ his gold-find and thus to eradicate the impact of having fulfilled his lifetime’s ambition – in order to avoid bad karma, he purchases some antique coins and hides them in a remote field, thus making amends for his ‘theft’. This is not to say that there is no plot to be found here; in fact, the show’s artful intersections between the archaeological story-lines and the private sphere rank amongst its most sublime achievements. In the first series, Andy and Lance detect on the land of Farmer Bishop, who is rumoured to have killed his wife and disposed of her body (a story-line that resonates with the domestic tensions both men struggle to resolve); the second series sees the DMDC help a young German who is looking to reconnect with his family history by searching for his grandfather’s shot-down World War II plane, while at the same time, Lance and Andy navigate the responsibilities of their own expanding family trees; and the final series is all about nesting and finding new territory: the DMDC is expelled from one of its favourite search-sites, and Lance and Andy attempt to settle down permanently with their respective families.12 However, there is a stubborn refusal to grow and, like in the classic Ealing comedies, a spirit of resistance in the face of modernisation to all these devel‐ opments, so that Detectorists occasionally comes to resemble the most plotless of all literary traditions: the Theatre of the Absurd. The intertextual connection is not only emphasised by the importance of waiting (as Andy and Lance spend the bulk of their time hoping for gold yet finding nothing), but it is evident in a number of scenes, starting with the very first exchange that passes between Lance and Andy in the prologue to the first episode: “Anything?” – “Fuck all.” (S1/E1, 00:00) This echoes the first words spoken in Waiting for Godot, “Nothing

11 In the first series, the viewer learns that Lance has won the lottery but has no intention of spending . When Andy, in the final series, desperately needs a big sum to make a down payment for a house, the possibility of Lance lending it to him never occurs to anyone. 12 Not to mention the final series’ meta-reflexive quality, as the looming deadline (the closing of the farm) coincides with the termination of the series. In the second of the final six episodes, Andy explains that they have “less than six weeks” left (S3/E2, 00:03). Detectorists (2014-2017) 107 to be done” (5). Furthermore, some of Detectorists’ more desolate landscapes recall Beckett’s sparse specifications of scenery – “A country road. A tree. Eve‐ ning.” (ibid. 5) –, and the same goes for the role of the tree as a timid symbol of hope. While Beckett’s duo derive comfort from the fact that the tree has grown a few leaves towards the end of the play (ibid. 90), Andy and Lance take it upon themselves to fight for the preservation of their beloved oak as a minor symbol of resistance against being expelled from the farm (S3/E5). Moreover, there is a near-verbatim allusion to Beckett’s oft-quoted ending. Both acts of Waiting for Godot famously conclude with an exchange between Vladimir and Estragon that underlines their lack of agency as well as the play’s continued discrepancy be‐ tween words and actions: Following Vladimir’s suggestion, “Shall we go?”, Es‐ tragon agrees, “Yes, let’s go”, only for direction to clarify that “[t]hey do not move” (91). Detectorists reiterates the joke when Russell and Hugh (Divian Ladwa), during a nightly excursion, stumble upon a couple having sex in their car. Contrary to their voiced intentions (“Can we go home now?” – “Yeah.”), they remain trapped in the headlights of the car and do not leave (S2/E3, 00:02). Like in Theatre of the Absurd (and some of the cringe comedies that were to follow in its footsteps), Detectorists is a show that is “[not] afraid of silence” (Sturges) – which follows logically from the way it constantly traps its characters in the pitfalls of language, tautology, and malapropisms. While watching his ex-wife’s New Age shop for her, Lance assures a customer that “the moonstone puts you in touch with the moon” and, in an impromptu speech of almost Shakespearean buffoonery, that “a spirit stick” is there to “hit spirits with” (S1/ E5, 00:05). In the same episode, he has trouble convincing Sophie of his lot‐ tery-win because she is under the impression that he is speaking in metaphors (S1/E5, 00:14). Consequently, the jokes do not derive from the kind of hyper-smart, witty banter that is frequently associated with the modern sitcom, but from the characters’ rather inadvertent exhibitions of wit. When giving Andy some relationship advice, Lance tells him, “you’re on thin ice. Could find your‐ self in some hot water.” (S1/E4, 00:05) As two simultaneously dim-witted and rather philosophical keepers of the land and soil, Andy and Lance occasionally resemble the English stage’s original existentialists: the two gravediggers in Hamlet (c. 1602), whose corporeal needs and crude jokes both undercut and amplify their memento mori wisdom. Where the gravediggers’ witty riddles teach Hamlet a valuable lesson about the volatile nature of human existence (as illustrated by his famous monologue about the great Alexander, whose “noble dust” is now only fit enough to “stop a beer-barrel”, Hamlet 5.1.193-201), Andy and Lance frequently discuss the occa‐ sionally bizarre demises of their off-screen acquaintances. On hearing that “old 108 Wieland Schwanebeck

Rod McLynn” has perished in a vat of boiling soup, Andy is mainly interested in what flavour was (S2/E4, 00:25), a remark that could have come straight from a Shakespearean jester, whose bodily needs will always thwart his philosophical ambitions. Detectorists does not flash these literary credentials, as it firmly rejects any overt celebration of highbrow culture, even though the image of Andy tumbling into his mother-in-law’s dustbin (S1/E5, 00:10) evokes another Beckett play, Endgame (1957), and Crook’s own assessment that the final series’ storyline resembles that “of the previous two series in that not much happens”13 appears to paraphrase Vivian Mercier’s famous quip on Beckett’s play as one “in which nothing happens – twice” (qtd. in Calderwood 34). But where Waiting for Godot only offers a fragile sense of communality in its supplementary pairings (Vla‐ dimir/Estragon and Pozzo/Lucky), Detectorists opts for a triumphant conclusion and posits a rather idealised view of community – and Englishness.

4. Join the Club The intertextual shadow of the gravediggers is not the only Shakespearean el‐ ement in Detectorists; in fact, the whole series may be an extended riff on the notion of the ‘Green World’, a concept that goes back to Northrop Frye. Ac‐ cording to Frye, Shakespeare’s plays often feature settings where the fairies weave their magic: idyllic, rural spaces, like the Forest of Arden in (c. 1599) or the woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1596), detached from the regular confines of social decorum and hierarchy, where anarchy is briefly allowed, where summer symbolically prevails over winter, and where the pro‐ tagonists are allowed a kind of sabbatical to prepare for fertile endings that coincide with a return to the state of normalcy, to marriage vows and a resto‐ ration of order (see Frye 182). Detectorists, right to its final episode, firmly refuses to shatter its bucolic realm, and its climax is an unabashed triumph of all the virtues commonly associated with the Green World: “contemplation instead of action, the happy harmonies of music and love instead of the metallic clash of arms and the discordances of conspiracy” (Laroque 193), even though here, the ‘happy harmonies’ do, ironically, include the metallic clanging that is music to the aspiring detectorist’s ear. Throughout all three series, metal-detecting re‐ mains firmly tied to a spirit of resistance against ‘going with the times’, against bowing to the dictate of corporations (who want to install solar panels on the

13 This comment can be heard on “Welcome to the Clubhouse”, a short documentary fea‐ tured on the DVD of the show’s final series. Detectorists (2014-2017) 109 fields of Danebury) and profitability – a very benign view that goes firmly against the stigmatisation of detectorists as mere treasure-hunters.14 Lance ide‐ alises the past, as is illustrated by his car fetish and his love for 1970s glamour icon Linda Lusardi (who cameos in a dream sequence, S3/E3, 00:01), to an extent that he even despises TV nostalgia conventions because they “aren’t what they used to be” (S2/E1, 00:26). This is, in itself, not new: the BBC has always taken pride in its promotion of clean, middle- and upper-middle-class entertainment (see Mills 52), and nostalgia has played a key role in that respect. In a legendary charter, Tom Sloan, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment in the 1960s, iden‐ tifies the elusive quality of ‘flair’ as a kind of magic ingredient to set off good and wholesome entertainment from the rest of the competition, and whenever this quality is invoked in debates surrounding British TV programming, accu‐ sations of an inherent conservatism of British sitcoms are never far off (see Kamm/Neumann 11-4). In Detectorists (which its creator has described as “the sitcom that Thomas Hardy would have written”, qtd. in Lewis), some of that spirit translates into clichéd imagery of a bucolic, pre-industrialised England – nowhere more so than in the final series, when Andy and Becky make a successful bid for their dream cottage in the woods, a place that Andy plans to retire to in order to be “a full-time hobbyist” (S3/E5, 00:16). There is little else he can do, being hopelessly lost for the real world, an idealist who finds himself frequently at odds with prospective employers. Andy substitutes water for weed-killer in order to spare the vegetation he is supposed to destroy (S3/E4, 00:07), and he quits his job as an archaeologist when the company’s interests clash with his ethos as a pre‐ server of history (S3/E3, 00:10). Needless to say, the show is wholly supportive of his moral integrity, and this sympathy for the underdog resonates with some of the most cherished traditions of British comedy, including the modern working-class comedy of the post-Thatcherist era, but especially the Ealing paradigm (see Schwanebeck 105-7): films like Passport to Pimlico (1949) or Whisky Galore! (1949), where the little man scores symbolic victories over au‐ thoritarian bullies by practising a “relatively gentle” form of “comic disruption and disorder” (O’Sullivan 71). Like the fondly remembered Ealing comedies, Detectorists celebrates a small group of eccentrics who resist any pressure to ‘move with the times’, and who firmly defend their small territory of outdated Englishness in the face of mod‐

14 Prior to the 1996 Treasure Act, treasure found by metal-detectorists automatically be‐ came property of the Crown. This led to a number of illegal sales, which contributed to the somewhat unfair stigmatisation of all detectorists as greedy (see Murgia/Roberts/ Wiseman 353-4). 110 Wieland Schwanebeck ernisation, thus presenting the viewer with “a picture of an England lost to time” (Barnett). This deeply nostalgic spirit for an allegedly ‘better’, glorified England of the past, which resonates with the series’ investment in the treasures hidden in England’s soil, has problematic aspects to it, of course, particularly in the age of Brexit. While most of the show’s critics took comfort in the fact that nothing could be “more quintessentially of these isles” than “the silhouette of a lone figure sweeping a metal detector back and forth in contemplative solitude in some remote English field” (ibid.), there can be no doubt that Detectorists har‐ bours a slightly more complex agenda underneath its good-humoured façade. It is not a coincidence that the years leading up to the Brexit vote saw a new wave of programmes in which the notion of a firmly white, pre-industrial ‘Merry England’ comes under increasing scrutiny and is revealed to be an invention of the heritage industry and to hide deeply regressive, horrific fantasies of in‐ breeding and exclusion. No wonder that The League of Gentlemen returned from a 15-year hiatus as soon as the United Kingdom had voted ‘out’, for its most well-known catchphrase (“Are you local?”) had suddenly acquired a dimension that not even its creators could have foreseen back in the 1990s.15 Of course, the League’s fictitious setting of Royston Vasey was already in itself a throwback to a staple of British horror fiction: the seemingly kind-hearted, bucolic small-town community whose inhabitants harbour horrifying secrets, murderous inten‐ tions, pagan cults, and cannibalistic urges. This bleak vision of idiosyncratic insular communities is the mean-spirited Other to Ealing’s vigorous opti‐ mism;16 it permeates classic British horror films like The Village of the Damned (1960) or (1973), and it returned with a vengeance in the new millennium, in films and TV series like Hot Fuzz (2007), Psychoville, Hunderby, and, to a degree, Broadchurch (2013-2017). In Detectorists, the idea of the devouring, predatory community is merely alluded to as a throwaway joke – while trying to make a new prospective DMDC member feel at home, Sheila (Sophie Thompson) half-jokingly assures him that “you’ve not joined a cult” (S2/E1, 00:17), but the ensuing forced laughter and awkward silence indicates that she may have touched a sore spot. The show’s paratextual apparatus (including its promotion materials, interviews, or DVD

15 , one of the creators of The League of Gentlemen, drew this analogy himself. When the League’s revival was announced, Gatiss pointed out that “we have become a local country for local people and I wonder if there is something Brexity in us that we can do” (qtd. in Jackson). 16 Tim O’Sullivan points out that there is a frequently unacknowledged darker side to the Ealing comedies, too. He mentions “stories of maverick and dangerous eccentricity” like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), where the quirky underdog resorts to cold-blooded murder to secure his interests (71). Detectorists (2014-2017) 111 extras) makes a point of stressing how much of a labour of love and a ‘family affair’ the series is, going so far as to cast Rachael Sterling’s real-life mother, British screen icon , as her on-screen mom, but at the same time, this suggests that the detectorists (both on- and off-screen) are very much content to remain amongst themselves; a narrative of self-sufficient insularity that made the show resonate with current political discussions in the run-up to the refer‐ endum. As the DMDC’s president, Terry constantly makes it a priority for them to branch out and to acquire new members, but his fellow detectorists are rather reluctant to follow suit. One of the show’s visual leitmotifs consists of placing the characters in vast surroundings, particularly the DMDC’s clubhouse, which could easily accommodate 100 people but never contains more than ten. When intruders come knocking, they are ogled suspiciously (see fig. 2), and much of the club-time is dedicated to denigrating the competition, “a wretched hive of scum and villainy” according to Andy (S1/E3, 00:15). Throughout the series, it is shared contempt for the Antiquisearchers that binds the club together, and the cruel humour which the two groups level at each other underlines that every successful process of forming a community and of including others implies an exclusion at the same time, for there is no such thing as an ‘us’ that would not go at the expense of a denigrated and stigmatised ‘them’.

Fig. 2: Please keep out (S2/E2, 00:15). 112 Wieland Schwanebeck

Occasionally, Detectorists puts the finger where it hurts, and draws the viewer’s attention to how fictional its glorified view of the past really is, and how fragile its sense of communality. In one of the most melancholic vignettes of the whole series, Andy digs up a medal saying “Jim fixed it for me” (S1/E3, 00:01), a re‐ minder of Jim’ll Fix It (1975-1994), one of the most beloved children’s pro‐ grammes in British TV history. But Andy’s pained expression speaks volumes, and we can assume that his own memories of having watched the show while growing up are now forever tainted by the subsequent revelations about the show’s host, Jimmy Savile.17 In another meta-reflexive scene, the DMDC questions its own idea of inclusivity: Terry proudly explains that they have “two lesbians and an Asian amongst their ranks”, and when his wife helpfully points out that “Louise and Varde are also women” and “not just lesbians”, he takes this as affirmation: “We got all the minorities covered.” (S2/E3, 00:13) Detectorists milks this very limited understanding of inclusivity for numerous laughs: as a running gag, Varde (Orion Ben) remains silent to viewers of the show, and when she attempts to speak, her fellow detectorists chastise her for monopolising the conversation (S3/E4, 00:11); Hugh, on the other hand, whom Terry counts as the club’s token Asian member, is constantly patronised and assumed to be a teenager. A similar kind of ambiguity permeates the show’s humour, which is generally on the “warm, affectionate” side (Lewis) and seems particularly intent on not offending anyone. There are no obscenities here, and even the occasional bits of innuendo are all in good humour. When the club-members erupt into a gig‐ gling fit at Terry’s inadvertent use of lewd imagery (during his customary speech on metal-detecting, he lectures them on “moist cracks” and “deeper penetration” of the soil, S3/E1, 00:15), the aim is neither to deliver a full-scale attack on his authority nor to make a desperate bid for another target audience. Yet while Detectorists never goes for the ‘wink-wink nudge-nudge’ school of smutty hu‐ mour nor for the kind of “mocking of the vulnerable” that is frequently associ‐ ated with modern-day sitcoms, where the jokes rest on racist or sexist stereo‐ types (Mills 79), it is not free of denigration. There is an almost paradigmatic sequence to drive home the point in the second episode of the third and final series, where meetings of the two rival detectorist groups are intercut with one another. At the DMDC clubhouse, Lance has just finished telling a joke, and they all erupt into laughter, pointing fingers at one another as a token of shared recognition (‘I laugh with you, I see you.’). This kind of laughter is very much a

17 Following Savile’s death in 2011, he was revealed to have been one of the worst sex of‐ fenders in British history, having molested hundreds of children throughout his career while enjoying the protection of the BBC. The inclusion of the scene in a BBC Four sitcom may be viewed as a belated attempt to make amends on behalf of the network. Detectorists (2014-2017) 113

Fig. 3: Laughing-with and laughing-at (S3/E2, 00:22). social event, one that builds a ‘community of laughter’ out of “shared worlds, shared codes, and shared values” (Reichl/Stein 13). Cut to the parallel meeting of the Antiquisearchers, where everyone is having a laugh at one of their mem‐ bers who appears to have made a fool of himself (see fig. 3). Here, too, fingers are pointed, but this time in order to facilitate someone’s temporary exclusion from the group (‘I laugh at you – look at you!’). On the surface, the scene seems to suggest that there is a clear-cut demarcation line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ 114 Wieland Schwanebeck laughter, an idea firmly supported by the mise-en-scène, which contrasts the brightly-lit DMDC clubhouse (Union Jack visible in the background) with the conspiratorial atmosphere of the back room where the Antiquisearchers meet. Yet viewed in context of the series, one cannot help but notice that laughter always cuts both ways, working “as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, of valorization on the one hand and of denigration on the other” (Horlacher 25), for the DMDC’s inclusive laughter (much like their club ethos) rests on the unspoken exclusion of those who have not joined the club, and who are denied access to the clubhouse. Both laughing-at and laughing-with require an “implicit acceptance of and identification with the norm”, which makes any kind of laughter “simultaneously criticism and affirmation” (ibid. 27, 35).

5. Conclusion Detectorists leaves its most exuberant celebration of communality for the grand finale, when the DMDC comes together one last time on the land that is about to be taken from them. The final episode is an odd proposition: on the one hand, it indulges in the kind of frantic tying-up of plotlines that is characteristic of the final act in a comedy (Shakespearean or otherwise), but on the other hand, it does so at a very gentle, almost pre-modern pace that never disrupts its pastoral spirit of idealised Englishness, and with a renewed sense of reconciliation. This time, Lance and Andy even invite the competition to join them, having learned that ‘Simon and Garfunkel’ and their fellow Antiquisearchers (who, at this stage, go by the name of ‘Terra Firma’) may not be so different from them, and that a metal detector is a metal detector, after all. The ending tries to have its cake and eat it, singing the praises of the Green World in a near-wordless montage, while at the same time gently poking its characters into moving on: marriage proposals are made, couples prepare for new living situations, friendships are formed, and the old certainties of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ appear to vanish as former rivals are welcomed to join the ranks of the club. Show-runner Mackenzie Crook lets his characters down gently, sparing the viewers the sight of what may be lurking outside the Green World. As his merry treasure-seekers come together to erect a gazebo and to share a glass of Sheila’s disastrous lemonade, Crook treats his audience to a contemplative montage: metal detectors are raised one final time against the heavens, in a gesture that serves simultaneously to invoke group solidarity and to also defy authority (see fig. 4). Family members (mostly female) seem content to watch, looking after the children and patiently reading books, thus acknowledging Leavis’ point that literature is the only way to retrieve the organic community, Detectorists (2014-2017) 115

Fig. 4: A merry band of brothers (S3/E6, 00:13). while the largely homosocial group of detectorists goes about its business as though they were ploughing the fields (S3/E6, 00:20). If Crook’s original aim in making the show was to write “a love song to the English countryside” (qtd. in Lloyd), then this is the bit where he treats his listeners to a final encore of the chorus. Needless to say, the show has, at this point, obliterated most of the traces of its occasional flirt with the subversive and has fully aligned itself with the kind of conservatism that some see as an in-built structural necessity of comedy – not just of the Ealing variety, which was so firmly associated with the “rear-view mirror” of misrecognition and misremembering in postwar Britain (O’Sullivan 67). However, it would be unfair to suggest that Detectorists is the programme of choice for all nostalgic Brexiteers, particularly because, by virtue of being a comedy show, it leans more strongly towards the ambiguous qualities of irony and remains firmly tongue-in-cheek about many of the values that its characters (not to mention its mise-en-scène) embrace. Chances are that, when confronted with the ‘in’ or ‘out’ question of the referendum, Andy and Lance would have responded with a resounding “Don’t care”, before grabbing their metal detectors and seeking out another field in England. 116 Wieland Schwanebeck

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