This week saw the conclusion of Mix Tape (BBC 2), a drama that follows its protagonists Dan and Alison across two timelines. One covers the beginnings of their teen romance, amid the grim glamour of late-1980s Sheffield. The other timeline, many years later, finds them living entirely separate lives in near middle-age.
Teenage Dan and Alison are fresh-faced sweethearts, schoolmates who bond over music and angst, exchanging devastatingly cool mix tapes featuring a roll call of new wave bangers. Older Dan and Alison have grown into writers – he is a music journalist, she is a novelist - separated by 10,000 miles, but united by a sense of ennui and a sudden urge to reminisce about their time together.
Will they reunite and attempt to rekindle that old flame? Well, yes, but the show is predicated on us pretending we don’t know this from the outset, so let’s keep that mystery alive.
While watching the show’s first two episodes, broadcast last week, I took the latter timeline to be “the present”, but that left me in a bit of a muddle. The decor, clothing and phones seemed broadly contemporary, but the burden of maths forced me to reckon with the fact that this “nowadays” section must be set about 10 years ago, or else our heroes are looking extremely sprightly for 55-year-olds. I tried to confirm this by freeze-framing a shot of Facebook used in the show, which does suggest it takes place in 2015/16. (If this is true, then I guess my first clue should have been that every adult in this programme is still using Facebook).
READ MORE
This is, after all, a friend-request romance, that genre of drama in which events are set into motion by social media notifications. In this case, it is when Older Dan, still living in Sheffield, is alerted to Alison’s massive new book deal. We learn he has not heard of her for many years, because she lives in a different TV show that’s set in Australia. There, she drinks balcony wines with her handsome doctor husband in their showroom apartment, where they fret over the behaviour of their daughter, whose teenage rebelliousness chimes somewhat with Alison’s own.
In the years since she stopped exchanging mix tapes with Dan, she has also become fully Australian, a detail that may seem a little convenient given the actor in question is Australian herself. Speaking as someone who moved to Dublin for college and thereafter developed a traitorous dollop of Leinster atop my Derry twang, I cannot possibly comment.
A lot of this show reminded me of my own life at 18. Not merely because I made desperately try-hard mix CDs for girls I fancied, but because I did so on the mean streets of Ireland’s capital, where all of the mix-tape era Sheffield scenes were filmed.
I don’t want to mire this article in tedious pedantry about a TV show’s shooting locations, not least since much was made of it when the show debuted last week, but it is unavoidably comic to witness establishing shots of Yorkshire’s urban exteriors cut directly to the pristine streets of Ranelagh or Rathmines.
Things entered an even more discombobulating realm in this week’s episodes when we discover that Young Alison subsequently moved to actual Dublin to work in a pub in Temple Bar. Having journeyed there to find her, Young Dan spots her in a tryst with another man and takes an emotional moment on the Ha’penny Bridge. At that point, action cuts abruptly to his older self back in Sheffield, a juxtaposition which may have carried more declarative oomph were it not very clearly filmed 20 minutes’ walk from said bridge, at the Dean Hotel on Harcourt Street.
All such quibbles aside, it’s quite watchable in an emotional, tear-jerky way, even if its plodding pace didn’t raise my heartbeat too often. The soundtrack is certainly great, but the show chooses to presume as fact, rather than demonstrate how or why, the music they fell in love with was earth-shatteringly, groundbreakingly important. The paper-thin characterisations of our heroes’ respective partners also seem explicitly geared toward giving us, the audience, license to let said spouses be discarded like decrepit band merch.
“You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape,” Alison tells her daughter in a car ride, which is a neat summation of the show’s themes of love and art transcending time and distance. It does, however, seem like resolutely useless advice to give a 16-year-old girl, since the curation of mix tapes should be as relatable to a teenager as talk of whale oil lamps or penny farthing maintenance. Perhaps kids were still doing this in 2015. It’s all so long ago, I can’t quite remember.
Trekking further into olden times, we find period murder mystery Bookish (U&Alibi) – or, rather, I found it, but you may still need directions. That’s because Mark Gatiss (co-creator of the BBC’s Benedict Cumberbatch-minting blockbuster, Sherlock) has returned to crime with this caperish series for U&Alibi, a channel with such an impressively prolix history of rebrands, I’ll offer a brief summary for the uninformed.
Originally launched as UK Arena in 1997, it was then renamed UK Drama, then UKTV Drama, then Alibi and, as of last November, the gloriously inscrutable “U&Alibi”. Since the fourth of those five brandings, the channel has focused solely on crime, mostly British-made listings-fillers culled from the yellowing pages of decades-old copies of the Radio Times.
Bookish, created, co-written and starring Gatiss, is one of the few full originals they’ve produced, and its premise seems curiously familiar; in period London, eccentric bookseller Gabriel Book – it’s that kind of show – supplements his day job by solving murders alongside his wife, Trottie.
He bears a letter from Churchill that grants him license to step into crime scenes and intrude on interrogations, in the manner of some sort of London-based amateur genius sleuth who works with the constabulary – a scenario I’m sure has some form of literary precedent I can’t quite put my finger on. The action takes place in 1946, rather than the Victorian era, although you may never quite banish the whiff of Baker Street from your nostrils while watching.
Gatiss is capable as ever in the lead, waspish and arch without quite tipping over into panto territory, and thankfully given more interiority to work with as the show goes on. The script is sharp and Bookish doles out its soft-scoop mysteries with a restraint that’s admirable, if occasionally frustrating.
[ What does the future hold for popular BBC show Masterchef?Opens in new window ]
Fans of Gatiss’s work with League of Gentlemen or his Ghost Stories For Christmas may sometimes wish, as I did, for something a little nastier than the cosier-than-thou fare on offer here. This is, for the most part, glacially gentle programming, albeit suffused with just enough quirk, charm and subliminal darkness, to raise it above the duvet-lined trenches of, say, Death in Paradise, or – God forbid – the treacly, incident-averse morass of Heartbeat.
For all its tropey trappings, Bookish is more cleverly written, and a good deal more handsomely mounted, than you might expect from a channel that sounds like a wifi password. U&Alibi may have just cracked the riddle of combining cosiness, craft and class. Turns out the answer was hiring Mark Gatiss, but you needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out.
