One of British entertainment’s big innovations is the public intellectual who can act a bit. It’s a role inhabited with gusto by Stephen Fry, who has spent his career bouncing between cinema and television, writing books and explaining to Gay Byrne that God doesn’t exist and why that’s a good thing.
Another member of the smarty-pants-on-screen-and-off-club is David Mitchell, a star of Jesse Armstrong’s pre-Succession comedy Peep Show, a regular on panel shows and the author of books about current affairs and the history of the British royals. He now returns to television with the agreeably chortle-filled comedy-thriller Ludwig (BBC One, Wednesday), in which he plays John “Ludwig” Taylor, a socially anxious professional puzzle writer who becomes a crack policeman by mistake (Ludwig is his puzzle-writer pen name).
His journey from crossword to cross-examination begins when sister-in-law Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) asks for his help tracing the whereabouts of her missing husband, policeman James.
Actually, she needs him to do more than that. Lucy wants John to access James’s notes, stashed in a safe at work. All he has to do is impersonate James, whizz into the office and open the safe. It’s a hare-brained scheme – but not that hare-brained, considering John and James are identical twins.
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But if they look the same on the outside, they are otherwise very different. In flashbacks to their adolescence, we learn that James is confident and outing while John is nerdy and a target for bullies. Being nerdy and a target for bullies is well and good if your job involves staying at home writing puzzles. But now John has to impersonate an ace copper – while keeping his feelings for Lucy under wraps (they clearly fancy each other – only she went with the more outgoing James instead).
Nobody would accuse Mitchell of being the second coming of Daniel Day-Lewis. However, he’s perfect as a tweedy twerp trying to pass himself off as a functioning member of society. He struggles to park James’s car and is then surprised to discover that his brother has a new partner (Dipo Ola), who immediately summons John to the scene of a murdered solicitor.
John blunders around awkwardly – until he realises solving a murder isn’t all that different from cracking a puzzle. He runs the numbers on the killing, identifies where each of the suspects were in the hours leading up to the crime and – bingo – unmasks the culprit (who breaks down crying and confesses everything).
Ludwig isn’t the first nerdy sleuth to grace our screens. His antecedents include Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, who much preferred hiding in his “mind palace” to interacting with other human beings. But Mitchell deploys his comic timing to impressive effect, and the series does well at teasing out the mystery of the missing James’s whereabouts and how much his fellow coppers do or don’t know. It’s a thriller stuffed with chuckles – and the perfect midweek distraction.
