Imagine if Mark Corrigan from Peep Show grew up, shucked off Jez and Croydon and became a puzzle setter living a quiet life. Not hard, is it? But it wouldn’t make for much of a show, so let’s give him a twin brother who is a police detective who goes missing while secretly investigating a case he has told his wife nothing about, yes?
That is the premise of Ludwig, in which David Mitchell plays an older Mark-type character – this one is called John – whose semi-estranged sister-in-law, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), calls him out of the blue to tell him she needs him to come over. There is a taxi waiting outside for him, the spare bed has been made up – with three pillows, no less – and Lucy will make whatever pasta he had planned for his supper when he gets there. As ever when Mark (now John) is involved, I – and perhaps I can speak for all my fellow pedant-troverts here – feel very seen.
Reluctantly, he goes. Even more reluctantly, he agrees to her plan to pose as her husband (his twin, James), infiltrate the police station and try to find clues about what he was working on and what has happened to him. Mitchell being the master of social agony, this plays out as excruciatingly as you could wish. Inevitably, he gets drawn into the murder case on which James’s team are working and, thanks to his talent for puzzles and a rigorously logical mind, solves it single-handedly. Peep Show meets Monk. You have the entirety now. Except for the fact that it’s called Ludwig because that is John’s crossword-setter pseudonym, which he adopted because he was listening to Beethoven when he compiled his first one. OK, on we go.
From here, we proceed on a case-of-the-week basis that draws on different sets of John’s puzzle-solving skills, while the mystery of James’s disappearance deepens and John and Lucy draw closer in the hunt for answers. In the background, there is also the puzzle of why the twins’ father abandoned the family when they were young.
It is a very gentle six episodes. There is a lot of explanation of every plot point and every twist – people point at documents during closeups of documents, look very carefully at names on office doors and lay out timelines as if viewers have only just discovered clocks – but its amiability predisposes you to suspend the vast amounts of disbelief required to make the thing work. For Mitchell is not required to play anything other than John/Mark. Lucy puts James’s jacket on him and takes John’s row of pens out of the pocket, but there the efforts at characterisation end. Mitchell is no Alec Guinness and John would no more fool James’s colleagues than a stuffed rabbit would. The idea would be preposterous, if you could summon the urge to care.
A secret notebook is retrieved; a menacing chief constable (played by Ralph Ineson, most recently seen doing a turn as a menacing DI in The Jetty) emerges as a wrong ’un; James’s investigative partner also goes missing and it is far from clear whether the new one, Russell (Landscapers’ Dipo Ola), can be trusted. But the only real tension comes from John’s suffering. Modernity does not suit him at all, the constant interaction with colleagues and the public even less. “Buildings, offices, computers! Everyone talking at once – moving around with no structure, no purpose!” he says after his first day, with Mitchell’s trademark baffled fury. On top of that, John must also deal with the glimpses he gets of his brother’s happy domestic life – the kind that has always been out of his reach.
Mitchell is as brilliant as ever at playing the part he was born to play. This is not to damn with faint praise – as long as you continue to do whatever your shtick is well, no one has cause for complaint. Maxwell Martin, meanwhile, breezes through a relatively simple part; her ability to invest it with nuance and warmth helps the disbelief-suspension cause a great deal. The supporting cast do what they can with the little they are given (it is, however unshowily, Mitchell’s show) and I suspect that every viewer will come away feeling they have had a perfectly reasonable return on the hour of time invested. Any more than that, after all, and all we Mark-a-likes would be far more disconcerted than pleased.
• Ludwig aired on BBC One and is available on BBC iPlayer
