Mix Tape review – hit-and-miss BBC drama is hard to love

Is there anything more romantic than a mix tape? You can keep your candlelit dinners, your meet-cutes, your trips to Paris. Just give me a knackered cassette featuring Joy Division album tracks and Pixies B-sides lovingly recorded off scratchy vinyl, and send it to me with a long letter about nothing. 

Wow, this scenario feels like such a relic of the past that I may as well be writing about cave painting, but back in the 90s that’s actually how my husband of almost 30 years won my heart. He bought my fanzine, we started a correspondence, he made me tapes scrawled with tiny, cramped writing in biro, and when his band came to town the rest was history.

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So how could I resist a drama about two star-crossed, music-obsessed kids in 90s Sheffield who fall in love via the ye olde medium of the mix tape? Especially one that looks so damn cool, actually gets the soundtrack (and very importantly, the hair) right, and sees them through to the present day where they are now both writers in failing marriages, living on opposite sides of the world.

I mean, excuse me, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I ORDERED FROM THE TELLY PROGRAMME SHOP. Allow me to put my feet up and wallow in shameless nostalgia while trying to remember the words to Jesus and Mary Chain songs!

Mix Tape flits effortlessly between the past and present, detailing the burgeoning lost romance between teenage Alison (Florence Hunt) and Dan (Rory Walton-Smith). The young actors are wonderful – earnest, fumbling and intense in a way that opens up the floodgates of memory.

The way their relationship develops through music is so vivid you can almost smell the Body Shop Dewberry and the inky pages of the NME. We also see Alison’s traumatic family life, which she feels compelled to hide, and is in stark contrast to Dan’s happy, scrappy working-class home, heavy on the homing pigeons and Sunday roasts.

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However, the modern-day version of Alison (Teresa Palmer) is a different matter entirely. She is a rare thing – a rich novelist (lol) who lives in a ridonkulously huge mansion in the Sydney suburbs. Dan (Jim Sturgess) is also a very rare thing, a freelance music journalist who has more than 50p to his name and doesn’t live in a wheelie bin.

It helps that they both have financially stable spouses. Her husband is a controlling surgeon, while his dissatisfied wife seems able to propose six-month road trips to America at the drop of a hat. Or should I say that doesn’t help, because they soon find themselves making mix tapes for each other again, this time with Spotify links via Facebook.     

I wanted to fall in love with these characters, but I’m on episode four now and they’re not making it easy. Perhaps it’s because this stylish Irish/Australian co-production is adapted from a novel, and brings with it some overwrought cliches best suited to a beach read. 

Often it’s like watching two shows: one a glossy Netflix potboiler starring Nicole Kidman in one of her many wigs, and the other a gritty northern version of High Fidelity. After a while, you start to wish that they’d stayed in the 90s, because Dan’s actually quite boring and she seems to have developed blue eyes and a personality bypass.

The script is also full of obvious signposting. I expected some sparkling dialogue and witty back and forth, but if these two really are supposed to be writers, I never want to read their books. 

Unfortunately, then, in the grand tradition of the format, I’m finding Mix Tape a bit of a mixed bag. Some moments I’d watch until the tape broke, but it’s peppered with duff dramatic decisions that are making me question whether this really is the right sensitive indie TV show for me. Maybe I should ditch it and snog a lad called Darren who drives a car instead. 

Mix Tape is on BBC iPlayer.

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