An ode to comfort
Beethoven, puzzles or those mustard hues… What is it that makes Ludwig such a delight to watch?
BBC/Big Talk
- Caroline Frost
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Many people consider Beethoven’s greatest work to be his Ninth Symphony, particularly its fourth movement with its rapturous Ode to Joy libretto. Much borrowed by bodies from the football Champions League to the European Union, it remains, in its 200th anniversary year, awe-inspiring and unique.
Ludwig, the detective named after the composer, can’t claim to be quite so original. As John Taylor, a happily solitary puzzle compiler (“Ludwig”) forced by events to masquerade as his missing identical twin James, who happens to be a senior police detective, David Mitchell has seemingly borrowed from every other beloved TV sleuth. With his social discomfort, Ludwig is cut from the same cloth as Jason Watkins’s DS Dodds (McDonald & Dodds) and Ben Miller’s Richard Poole (Death in Paradise), while his clumsiness is that of Poole’s successor, Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall). Ludwig’s Cambridge setting has hosted plenty of crime-solvers, from Professor T to Grantchester’s vicars and, for his pleasure in puzzles, see also Morse, young and old versions.
Why, then, all the love for Ludwig, which was last week’s most watched BBC show across all ages and which, four episodes in, already feels like a safe cornerstone of the evening schedule – in the words of one RT correspondent, “ripe for a second series”?
The Beethoven-inspired soundtrack is a nice touch, but I take more delight in the palette – Ludwig has two production designers working overtime to create all those lovely blues and mustards. Then there’s the pleasure of a challenging puzzle tied up with a big bow before the credits, plus the never-failing premise of a beta male in peril, just about securing his dignity and getting one over younger, f
itter types – in this case by solving every crime from under their noses, and almost in passing, when he should be determining the fate of his brother.
Ludwig feels like a safe cornerstone of the evening schedule
At the heart of it all as the beleaguered, corduroy-jacketed eponymous hero is David Mitchell. Does it hinder that he and his scratchy RP tones are so familiar that he could have walked off the set of a panel show and into a police station? No, because the premise is already so ridiculous – why haven’t James’s colleagues who have worked alongside him for so long, and are actual police officers, become at all suspicious?
Mitchell’s presence is just a reminder that we have nothing to worry about here. It’s not The Killing. Some critics have said that he’s just playing himself, despite his wife Victoria’s protestations that this is no Upstart Crow or Peep Show. She may have a point: the real Mitchell is actually playing his customary screen Mitchell playing John Taylor, playing James Taylor.
It would be an Oscar-worthy Russian doll of an effort if all those characters weren’t essentially what we believe to be the real David Mitchell – a gentle, wide-eyed, self-deprecating soul, unafraid of expressing vulnerability but clearly a quick-witted match for anyone wanting to take him on. Mitchell as Ludwig isn’t perfect casting, because it’s not even casting.
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Despite its derivation from every other bit of TV sleuthing, it can’t be as easy as it looks, or they’d all be doing it. An American advertising executive called James Webb Young once said, “An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements.” Here, that is the simple pleasure of a solvable mystery in a cosy setting, led by a character we root for. Nothing too puzzling, in fact, just satisfying – or joyful, if we were to ask the original Ludwig.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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