Small Prophets: How a Humble Garden shed Steals the Show

When you think “star of a BBC sitcom”, you don’t usually picture a slightly ramshackle garden shed (. Maybe 1930’s once a garage now defiantly a shed) . Yet in Small Prophets, the new Mackenzie Crook comedy, Michael Sleep’s shed quietly becomes the show’s true leading location , part laboratory, part sanctuary, part shrine to bad decisions.

A show built on grief, hope… and jars

Small Prophets follows Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley), a Mancunian stuck between his job at a DIY store and the unresolved disappearance of his partner, Clea . He’s drifting, visiting his dad Brian (Sir Michael Palin). Marking time in a house that still feels half-occupied. Everything changes when Brian passes on a bizarre alchemical recipe, involving rainwater, earthy ingredients. A dash of family folklore, that promises a path to prophecy.

Michael decides to grow Homunculi: tiny prophetic beings that, if coaxed into life, might tell him whether Clea will ever return. Isn’t it an absurd premise played with a gentle, melancholic touch?

Buy a homunculus in jar (inspired by Small Prophets)

The result is a story that balances grief and hope on a knife-edge, and it all unfolds in and around it. Because of a garden shed.

The shed as the show’s beating heart

On paper, the shed is just another suburban outbuilding at the bottom of a small garden . On screen, it’s where almost every meaningful moment begins . Michael’s experiments, his late-night doubts, his whispered questions to the jars, his uneasy conspiratorial friendship with colleague Kacey (Lauren Patel ) they all crystallise in this cramped timber box.

The other characters, the shed is a magnet for suspicion . Neighbours clock the odd smells, strange lights and clinking glass late into the night . Clea’s brother Roy (Paul Kaye ), desperate. They are all convinced Michael is hiding something out there . What could have been a forgettable background structure becomes the focal point of a whole cul-de-sac’s anxiety and curiosity.

For sheddies, it’s instantly recognisable: the shed as an extension of the self, where you do the things you can’t quite explain to anyone else.

Inside Michael’s shed: layout and logic

Part of the shed’s impact comes from how grounded it feels. Mackenzie Crook has talked about how the production first shot in his own shed, then recreated it as a studio set with removable walls . That decision gives the on-screen shed a familiar, believable layout rather than a glossy “TV workshop” fantasy.

Here’s how it works. Well.

The cluttered threshold

Open the door and you’re immediately in it . There’s no generous porch or neat staging area; you step straight into hanging tools, shelves, boxes. Years of accumulated “that might come in handy” . This cramped threshold does two things:

• It makes every entrance feel like a transition from ordinary life into a slightly otherworldly zone.
• It lets the camera use over-the-shoulder glimpses and half-blocked views to keep the space visually interesting. A bit secretive.

The central workbench

In the middle (or as close to the middle as you can manage in a small shed) sits Michael’s primary work surface . This is the alchemical heart of the show: jars, scribbled notebooks, funnels, improvised glassware, rainwater containers, all laid out in organised chaos.

This bench is where the recipe comes to life . It’s where Michael labels jars, measures ingredients. Convinces himself he’s following a rational process rather than tumbling into obsession . Whenever the story needs to feel “scientific” in a homemade, Heath-Robinson way, we’re back at this table.

Wall-to-wall storage. Shelves

Around the perimeter, traditional shed clutter blends with the strange new world of Homunculi-making . Old paint tins, garden tools and boxes of unknown bits share shelf space with bottles of murky liquid, specimen jars. Half-completed experiments.

That mix is precisely what gives Small Prophets its charm: magic stitched into the mundane . Nothing in the shed looks like it came from a prop store; it looks like a real sheddie has simply repurposed whatever was already there to support a new obsession.

The Homunculi “nursery”

Michael’s tiny would-be prophets live together in their own dedicated zone, a cluster of jars arranged so the camera can return to them again. Again.

The show draws on old alchemical lore where these jars are warmed in earthy material, giving the space a faintly agricultural, compost-heap-meets-laboratory feel . It keeps the magic firmly grounded: less gleaming lab, more muddy experiment on a cold British evening down the allotment.

The armchair corner

One key difference between a typical shed. Michael’s is the presence of a sagging armchair tucked into a corner . It’s a simple addition,. It changes the nature of the space completely.

The armchair turns the shed from a workshop into a living space . Michael doesn’t just work here; he sulks, naps, broods, listens to the jars. Hides from the world . Isn’t it where grief spills over into ritual He treats the shed not just as a project space but as a confessional and a refuge.

Built. Spying

Because the set was designed with removable walls and clever sightlines, the audience often sees the shed the way the neighbours might: glimpses through the half-open door, narrow windows, or from the house looking down the garden . That choice feeds the running joke and quiet tension of everyone trying to guess what on earth is going on out there.

What the Small Prophets shed says about us

Underneath the Homunculi and the occult recipe, the Small Prophets shed taps into something very familiar to sheddies: the idea that your little timber room is where you can be most yourself.

Buy the DVD, Bluray, watch or Ebay

Michael’s shed is:

• A workshop : he’s building, tweaking, measuring. Recording like any hobbyist.
• A laboratory : recipes, results, failures, the whole lot play out on that bench.
• A sanctuary : when the house is too full of memories and the world too noisy, he retreats to the only space he can fully control.
• The story : for the show, it’s where characters clash, confess, collude and collide.

Most sheddies won’t be brewing prophetic beings in jars (we hope), but plenty will recognise the feeling of turning a simple garden outbuilding into something much bigger in personal terms: a studio, a brewery, a repair shop, an office, a test bed for eco-projects or wild ideas that don’t belong in the kitchen.

From screen to your shed

If Small Prophets does anything for the wider shed world, it’s to underline how dramatically a small, ordinary structure can shape a story . Give a character a shed and you give them a private stage , a place where the rest of the world only sees half the picture.

Of course, Share the whole of your shed with us. Shed of the year 2026

Small Prophets is on BBC Two on Mondays at 10pm or the whole shed has dropped on iPlayer now

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