“Watching The Office lately, my heart just sank” – Mackenzie Crook on comedy, cruelty, and being TV royalty | Mackenzie Crook

IIn BBC Two’s new six-part series Little Prophets, Mackenzie Crook plays Gordon, the manager of a huge craft store. Sometimes, it feels as if we’re falling through time, because it’s like watching Gareth, the role Croke landed in The Office, a quarter of a century later. “He’s pedantic and hard-headed,” says Crook, “who could be like a grown-up Gareth, with a little more disillusionment, without the country-western accent.” “I wrote Gordon as a monster, but in the end, I actually really liked him.”

On a personal level, Kroc has a humble and volatile energy. When he was young, on screen it looked like nerves, but now it looked more like curiosity. He has an amazing number of tattoos, but maybe I should stop being surprised when people have them.

Gordon is no champion of the Minor Prophets; He’s not even an anti-hero. This is the story of Michael, played by Pierce Quigley, in a performance so comedic and subtly heartbreaking that you rarely find out why you’re sad. Fifty-something, bearded, grumpy and chunky, he works in a DIY store and visits his father, Brian (a lovely performance by Michael Palin), every afternoon. Michael has faced a major tragedy in the recent past — his girlfriend Clea vanished without a trace seven years ago — but he’s never made up a song and dance about it.

At first glance, it could be an accurate and honest rumination on middle age. “Of course it is,” Crook says. “I’m a bit obsessed with being middle-aged. It’s crept up on me. It all seems like 20 years ago. It’s a surprise to find myself with grown-up children.” He pauses, then says seriously: “‘Adult children’ is a terrible expression. ‘Do you have children?’ ‘Oh yes, they’re adults now.'” This is classic Crook tangent — you’ll know it if you like Detectorists — an idea delivered with an endless sadness that is true but so inflated and exaggerated that it becomes laughable. Honestly, having adult children (Croc has two: Scout, 19, and Jude, 22 – a comedian) is not a good thing Which sad. The passage of time is not Which bad. It’s better than if it hadn’t passed. The gist of the joke is the depression itself, but the depression is real too.

However, it is in the middle-aged rut that Michael begins. Then his father threw in the switch that he knows how to grow homunculi – miniature, fully fledged (if weird) humans you can ask any question to and they have to tell you the truth. Brian begs his son to follow the recipe. Maybe the creatures can tell him what happened to Clea. Michael does what his father tells him to do, trying to be nice, thinking he is losing his courage. He follows the instructions, and when he clicks each of the cloudy bells to reveal the homunculi, the effect is downright magnificent—perhaps because it is so unexpected, or perhaps because of the simple ordinariness of the suburban street, or the hero, or the neighbors, or perhaps because magical realism is something that only a few people can achieve. “I’ve always been fascinated by stories of lonely people. I’ve also been fascinated by stories of ordinary people who have something extraordinary happen to them, turning their lives upside down.”

Life goes on as if the supernatural had not happened. Business remains mediocre and the neighbor still complains constantly about the state of Michael’s front lawn. He was written as evil too, “But [actor] John Pointing brought something to him that made me feel sorry for him. He just wants some peace and quiet, some order, and he lives next door to this chaotic rogue who seems to have inner peace. How could this bearded man, this hoarder, be more satisfied than me? I wrote these completely two-dimensional sitcom characters — the boss, the next-door neighbor — and they didn’t come out that way.

This is a project drawn from a life of influences. The giants of experimentation and surrealism – David Lynch and Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze – but also the shows of the 70s and 80s, “the good life, the ever-decreasing circles”, “their lack of irony, their lack of cruelty”. It lands in a unique place, though it can’t help but remind you of Detectorists at its core. “After ‘The Office,’ I wanted to write something that didn’t have harsh humor, that didn’t have a throwback factor. And while doing that, I found my genre — lighthearted comedy.” I’m not wild about that term. It doesn’t look funny and like you’re trying not to offend anyone. “Well, maybe it’s more complicated than I know. I don’t want to report anything. I don’t want to tell people when to laugh, when to cry, what to feel. I like to downplay things.”

The Bureau never downplays anything, and no awkward situation will end before it becomes a thousand times more awkward. Crook — who was born Paul Crook, but changed his name when registering with the actors’ union, Equity — recently rewatched it for the first time and had what sounds like a PTSD flashback. “In the second series, the fire alarm goes off and everyone is evacuated. Watching it, I had a real Pavlovian reaction where my heart just sank, because I knew something terrible was about to happen. I forgot all about it.” (David and Gareth start out trying to get a disabled employee down the stairs, then give up midway, saying if the fire is real they’ll definitely come back for her. It’s painful.) The show was best known for its mockumentary TV documentary, but it also put pain into “painfully funny.”

It was a hard fall to fame for Kroc in the 2000s. “It became this thing in the press, ‘I was the weird-looking guy.’ I thought, ‘You put this on me; I don’t think I look weird. You’re thinking about Gareth, and now you can’t see Gareth, so I’ll stay weird looking forever. Or maybe I’m just weird looking? But surely if I had been weird looking, that would be what the kids at school would have said?” What did people at school say? “Well, I was young. My name was Paul. So I was little Paul.”

He’s also happier writing, editing and directing. “I’m not interested in acting. It’s fun. But I’m not interested in it anymore. And I’ve never really bought into acting. I can always see myself acting my socks off, honestly. When I look at the office, in my eyes, it’s like I’m on a different show to everyone else. Martin Freeman is very natural, very believable, and then Gareth comes in, and he’s like: ‘What are you doing mate?’ Tone it down a bit. But people like the character so it might just be me thinking that.

When he came up with the idea for Detectorists, which first aired in 2014, it was very different from what appeared on screen. “It was more depressing. The whole thing about metal detecting is that it happens in the winter months when there are no crops, so I pictured two guys in jackets standing against the wind in a plowed field. But we shot the pilot on the hottest day of the summer, and it looked so beautiful, and I realized we were going to miss a trick to make it grey. The weather and the countryside became a big part of the show.” Andy (Croc) and Lance (Toby Jones) have this very quiet symbiotic heroism – every day a mini-triumph over the disappointment that seems to loom on every horizon. It was written in their hobby! Metal detectors rarely find any Saxon coins.

Detectorists has the kind of special fan following that only truly special dramas have, which Croke says is because the BBC let him do what he wanted. “The stakes were so low that they didn’t have to get involved in it, they let me go away and do whatever. It turned out to be this thing that people love and cherish. In Small Prophets, the stakes are a little higher, because it has elements of surreal and magical realism, so it’s more expensive.” When it was pitched to the BBC, it was a show in which things happen that may never be resolved – perhaps you’ll never find out what happened to Clea; Maybe kids who steal a security car will get away with it. “And that’s the way it’s done. It’s surreal and weird, but I hope it’s not forced, even though the way you just described it, it sounds forced.”

The homunculi are stop-motion animation, not animation, because he wanted nostalgia – “it was a deliberate attempt to put some magic into it” – and the creatures, not the characters, are where the idea began. “You know, I don’t believe in the supernatural at all,” he begins, before allowing, “I remember when I was a kid I used to buy an ‘unexplained’ magazine—pictures of ghosts and spontaneous human combustion—and I wanted to believe it, to want there to be things you couldn’t explain. I think those are the elements of the stories I loved as a kid, James and the Giant Peach, the lonely children, the lonely orphans. I don’t know why, because I come from a happy, loving family. With siblings and friends, but there’s something romantic about it. It is a sad escape.

Minor Prophets is running BBC Two and iPlayer from 9 February.