Little wonders

Mackenzie Crook tells us about his magical new series starring comedy legend Michael Palin and Pearce Quigley

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Michael works at a hardware store with disillusioned youngster Kacey (Lauren Patel) and their jobsworth boss Gordon, who is played by Mackenzie himself.

Inspiration can strike in the most unlikely places - just ask Mackenzie Crook who was reading about a medieval Swiss alchemist, which sowed the seeds of a whimsical comic fairytale.

However, it would be 10 years before he began work on his new BBC sitcom Small Prophets starring his Detectorists colleague Pearce Quigley, national treasure Michael Palin and a host of stop-motion homunculi.

"The germ of the idea came from a strange little passage in a book about Paracelsus, a medieval Swiss alchemist," explains Mackenzie, 54. "It was a footnote in this book written in the 19th century that was these instructions for growing these creatures, these homunculi. And it was written with such attention to detail that you could believe that if you tried it, it might actually be true. It bewitched me."