Waiting For You: A Detectorists Zine

(This review first published in Fortean Times No 421, dated August 2022)

Waiting For You: A Detectorists Zine
Ed. Cormac Pentecost
Temporal Boundary Press 2021/22
Pb, 54pp, £6.75

“There’s something about Detectorists,” begins editor Cormac Pentecost in his introduction to Issue One of this charming zine. And he’s right. Quietly flourishing in a shady nook of BBC4’s schedule between 2014 and 2017, Mackenzie Crook’s sublime sitcom followed the low-octane adventures of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club, a tiny huddle of hobbyists seeking buried treasure in the Essex countryside. Over three series, the show’s own complex strata of themes were slowly uncovered: the intertwining of love and obsession, the mindfulness of all-consuming pastimes, and the relationship between landscape, history and the lingering echoes of “what lies beneath”.

In the first issue, Folk Horror enthusiast Pentecost collates a series of essays that concentrate heavily on these latter aspects. David Colohan’s excellent ‘Phantom Signals: Voices From the Past in Detectorists’ notes the influence of M.R. James in the show’s subtle dalliances with the uncanny. For both Crook and James, the landscape is protective of its legacy and will punish those who disrespect its secrets, and Colohan compares the gentle haunting of detectorist Lance (Toby Jones) in the 2015 Christmas special to the dire fate of hapless antiquarian Paxton in A Warning To The Curious. Elsewhere, David Petts contributes a splendidly wry paper on the psychogeography of the fictional Danebury, and Rosemary Pardoe reviews a brace of earlier novels by Crook that reveal a burgeoning interest in the otherworldiness of the English countryside. His 2011 book The Windvale Sprites and its 2013 prequel The Lost Journals of Benjamin Tooth both depict fairies lurking amid pastoral idylls.

Issue Two belies its pandemic origins and reaches out with a vulnerable touch. Scott Lyall explores the mindfulness of hobbies – including his own passion for Bigfoot-related forteana – while Innes M. Keighren writes touchingly of the show as a comforting refuge from anxiety, a “golden summer” encapsulation of a modern-day Merrie England. And Pentecost’s own joyous exploration of the Botswana death metal scene, inspired by a single line of Series Two dialogue, feels hilariously representative of our collective lockdown wormholes. With a third edition on the way, Waiting For You is an appropriate tribute to Detectorists: filled with simple pleasures, gleeful diversions and the occasional fleeting spectre.

Four editions of Waiting For You are now available from:
https://temporalboundary.bigcartel.com