This special isn’t quite as perfect as the original, but revisiting Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones’s precious sitcom is pure pleasure. It beats all other yuletide TV hands down
Photograph: Kevin Baker/BBC/Channel XPhotograph: Kevin Baker/BBC/Channel Xt used to be customary for sitcoms to change their location when they returned, after the end of the regular series, with a film spin-off or a feature-length Christmas special. The characters would be holidaying abroad, perhaps, or at least loading up the car and going to an unfamiliar part of the UK. Detectorists , one of the very greatest sitcoms, would never do that.
Five years since we last saw them, nothing much is different for middle-aged best pals Andy and Lance . Their big news is a fresh “permission”, a green light to hunt for buried artefacts on farmland unvisited by detectorists.
This is a comedy about not going anywhere, for good and for ill. The way Andy and Lance have devoted hours, weeks, years to pacing up and down in mud, waiting for their detectors to beep, is representative of enthusiasts and dreamers everywhere: concentrating on something esoteric helps them to delay confronting tricky real-world issues such as relationships, careers and emotions.
But it is also traditional for belated comeback specials not to be as good as the original series, because the balance of the storytelling is off – and, although a bad episode of Detectorists is still the best thing you will watch all Christmas, the delicate equilibrium it maintained through three seasons of elliptical half-hour episodes isn’t quite kept up.
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