In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable dreaminess (in a cunning twist, those of Cambridge), it has a main character who solves crimes and cryptic crosswords with equal efficiency.
Once the series began, though, it was clear that its sights were set a little lower than that. Instead, the show seems content to take its place as the latest proof that plausibility is out of fashion in TV drama these days. (In my last column I reviewed Nightsleeper, which had no time for it at all.)
One reason this detective feels like the traditional fish out of water, for example, is that he’s not a police detective. When we first saw John Taylor (David Mitchell), he was passing the time in what was evidently his usual way: alone at home either setting or airily completing newspaper puzzles. (Ludwig is his crossword-compiling nom de plume.)
But then came a call from his brother’s wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) summoning him to Cambridge where she had a simple request: would he please pretend to be his identical twin James, go into the local nick where James was a senior cop and retrieve his brother’s notes about the case he’d been working on before his mysterious disappearance a few days before? John, of course, demurred in a flurry of indignant ‘absolutely nots’ – but given that we wouldn’t have a show otherwise, it wasn’t long before he was in the police station lobby trying to remember what Lucy had told him about James’s colleagues.
Even so, by then Ludwig had already established John’s chief traits – not so difficult as there are only two of them: social awkwardness and a distaste for the modern world. (These, you’ll notice, are the chief traits of all the characters that David Mitchell plays – including David Mitchell on Would I Lie to You?) Obligingly, none of the other coppers appear to have noticed that the guv has had a full personality transplant. Less obligingly, they keep interrupting his quest for James’s notes by inviting him to whodunit murder scenes where he briskly reveals the killer’s identity using his puzzle skills.
In short, this is a show that John himself, with his devotion to logic and reason, would presumably despise. The trouble for those of us pedants who’d like to follow suit is that it’s also extremely likeable – thanks partly to the always enjoyable sight of David Mitchell doing his David Mitchell, and partly to the genial way in which it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
So are today’s drama-makers right to think that plausibility doesn’t matter? That viewers will happily go along with any old nonsense if the results are entertaining enough? Slightly to my disappointment, my own spoilsport answer is ‘not quite’. Ludwig is certainly fun to watch – but I still think it would be more so if our suspension of disbelief didn’t require such a teeth-clenching effort.
ITV’s new drama Joan is pretty far-fetched too – the difference being that it’s based on a true story. Sunday’s first episode opened in a posh London hotel where Joan (Sophie Turner – Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones) was glamming up before sweeping regally into a Rolls-Royce.
We then cut to four months earlier when she was living above a Chinese takeaway in a grim seaside town as the abused wife of a rubbish criminal. After two of her husband’s thuggish creditors threatened to kill her beloved six-year-old daughter, Joan left home, placed the girl in care for what they both hoped will be a short while and headed to London to seek the fortune she somehow felt entitled to.
A kind of 1980s Becky Sharp, Joan blagged a job in a jeweller’s where the pervy owner was too busy fantasising about her to notice when she swallowed some loose diamonds. Nipping to the pub afterwards, she happened to mention to a bloke that she was a thief – and he happened to be a fence. By the end of Monday’s episode, the two had joined forces and the high life had begun.
So far, Joan has been a largely workmanlike telling of a good story. It does, however, have its strengths – most obviously Turner’s performance, which captures not just Joan’s determined glamour but also the pesky sense that she can’t shake off not really belonging amid London wealth any more than she did amid coastal squalor.
The show’s attitude to Joan is a strength as well. Naturally, it never wags its finger at her criminal activities; but nor, more surprisingly, does it hold her up as a feminist heroine. Instead, it sticks firmly to a policy of amorality – something not often considered a good quality, but that here seems both dramatically right and perhaps even quite brave.
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