'It's very unlikely that we're the only life in the universe'

As 'Small Town, Big Story’ begins, Christina Hendricks and Chris O’Dowd talk to Helen Coffey about the siren call of our roots, and why believing in UFOs makes perfect sense

- Helen Coffey

Christina Hendricks has seen an alien. Well, a UFO, really but still. She’s even got a picture on her phone to prove it. I am told this story matter-of-factly by the Mad Men actor when I enquire as to whether she and Chris O’Dowd believe in extra-terrestrial life. “I think there has to be,” she says simply.

It’s a relevant question, given the plot of their new joint venture, Small Town, Big Story. Created by O’Dowd (who also cameos in a few episodes), the six-part Sky Atlantic show follows Hollywood producer Wendy Patterson (Hendricks) as she returns home to the fictional Irish town of Drumbán where she was born in order to shoot a ludicrous “historical” fiction adaptation called I Am Celt. It soon transpires that Wendy and her former flame Seamus (Paddy Considine), now the local doctor, underwent a mystifying, out-of-this-world experience as teenagers – one that forever altered the course of their lives. The tone sits somewhere between comedy and melodrama – O’Dowd was aiming for “opera”, he says – as the cast of misfit characters uncover more about the town’s long history of attracting interstellar visitors.

Yes, alien abduction might seem a somewhat fantastical notion, but, suggests O’Dowd, it’s no more outlandish than the fae and woodland spirits that often typify tales set in Ireland – or, in fact, the idea of God. “Inarguably, it’s not even close that those two things are as likely. It’s very unlikely that we are the only species in the universe. We’re too imperfect for that to be the case. And if we’re so imperfect, how could somebody have bothered creating us?” He’s not ruling out Area 51-style conspiracy theories either. “It may be that we’ve had many first encounters that we haven’t treated with violence – and they’re all being held somewhere that you’d never know about.”