Starring fellow Detectorist Toby Jones

Mackenzie Crook is to direct his first film – with his Detectorists co-star Toby Jones in the lead role. 

The project has the working title Mars Express and is based on the true story of  Colin and Judith Pillinger, and their mission to find life on Mars in the late 1990s. 

A description of the film on Screen Daily, which first reported it, describes the couple as ‘English farmers [who] pulled together a team of misfits who took on Nasa and almost won.’

However that underdog description does underplay Colin’s academic achievements. At the time he was Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, a position once held by Sir Christopher Wren. He was also professor in interplanetary science at The Open University and worked on Nasa’s Apollo space programme, analysing rocks brought back from the Moon.

His ambitions to send a probe to Mars – despite resistance from the British and European space bureaucracy – led to the Beagle 2 Mars lander project, launched in 2003.

Joe Bone, who co-wrote the 2018 film The Vanishing, has penned the script for the movie, based on Colin’s 2010 book My Life On Mars: The Beagle 2 Diaries. The scientist died in 2014, aged 70.

Screen Daily reports that the filming will take place later this year, with the movie featuring a soundtrack of Britpop classics. 

On TV, Crook directed Detectorists and Small Prophets, based on his own scripts, as well as the second series of Bridget Christie’s Channel 4 comedy The Change and five episodes of Worzel Gummidge, in which he also starred.

Producers are Big Talk Studios and Altitude, with the project developed in association with BBC Film.

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Published: 12 May 2026