- by FK
- The Guardian
- Issue #2186
In a world full of series that go on and on until even the people making then don’t want to watch anymore, there’s a charm in a short series that just ends quickly, so it’s no discredit to MacKenzie Crook’s Small Prophets when I say that I really hope there isn’t a second season. As it is, this show is a delight, and I hope the ‘to be continued’ at the end is just teasing.
On one level, it doesn’t seem charming at all. Michael (Pearce Quigley) has a super-boring job at a British Bunnings-alike homeware store. There’s nothing to like about the job, and his home life is very dull. Michael’s girlfriend vanished seven years before the show begins. His underemployed and nosy neighbours would get on anyone’s wick. Michael goes to his boring job, where he winds up customers by talking nonsense, and avoids the stale wit of his equally miserable workmates. All is alienation in a Britain where working people just get by without any solidarity or cheer.
His father has dementia and is in an aged care home. Mackenzie Crook, whose show it is, restricts himself to a part very similar to the one he played in the original British version of The Office; he’s the creepy, overserious middle manager who tries in vain to boss Michael around.
You might conclude that the only thing to get out of Small Prophets is that you’re glad you don’t live in the UK and work in a British Bunnings, think again! On another level, all is life-affirming charm. The dementia sufferer, father, played by very lovable Michael Palin, introduces his son to alchemy. Michael starts to make homunculi,the ‘prophets’ of the title, in jars, helped by workmate Kacey (Lauren Patel) who dreams of being in Neighbours. Will the ‘prophets’ survive the people next door?
Without spoiling it for you, I can say that the show delivers a sort of happy ending, but not a predictable one. It holds back from the big ‘everybody wins’ outcome Hollywood likes so much. Also, the scenes where Michael trolls the customers are funny (he convinces one man that buckets are a thing of the past, while standing in front of a wall of buckets).
There’s even a kind of happy ending for the alienated kid who just rides his bike around Michael’s house “like a caged animal” as Kacey observes.
Before you know it, Small Prophets is over. It doesn’t leave this viewer wanting more, but it does leave me very glad I saw it.
