James reviews Ludwig on BBC1, Anna Richardson: Love, Loss & Dementia on Channel 4, and MAFS UK: It’s Official! With Chloe Burrows on E4.

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the thirty-ninth episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’ 

This is where I review Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews, past and present. And it’s also available in the usual places where you get your podcasts. If one is missing, do let me know. And if you’re curious about the future, see the ‘What’s up next’ section at the end, or look for the ‘what’s up next’ page. That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com. 

In this episode, I will review:

Ludwig on BBC1, 

Anna Richardson: Love, Loss & Dementia on Channel 4, and

MAFS UK: It’s Official! With Chloe Burrows on E4.

Well, here we go: an assortment picked quickly on the fly. I’d heard of Ludwig, even read a good review about it, so I thought I might as well shove in my critical ha’pence. And if it’s reasonable, I might even pick up Episode 1 from BBC iPlayer. As for Anna Richardson: Love, Loss & Dementia …. well … like most people my age, I’m scared? Terrified? Curious? About losing my marbles, and ending up drooling in the corner. In fact, this Podcast is an attempt to keep my brain chugging along, like an old canal boat carrying an assignment of used socks to Newcastle. That and a daily Wordle, a fibre rich diet tasting of cardboard and moaning about global warming. And to finish, what is - are? - MAFS? That’s M A F S. No idea, so I thought I’d find out.

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

a man with a head like a jigsaw is looking at an old man with an empty space in his head while in the background are a bride and groom.

To explain: I had to look up ‘MAFS’ It’s ‘Married at First Sight.’ Hence the bride and groom. And I also looked up ‘Ludwig,’ which gave me the man with a jigsaw head. And of course, the ‘old man with an empty space in his head’ is a reference to dementia.

The resulting image I find oddly OK. Yeah, I know jigsaw head man looks nothing like David Mitchell, AKA an ersatz Santa Claus, but the old chap with bits of his brain missing is rather terrifyingly convincing. But, hey ho, things don’t always turn out how you expect.

So, here we go ….

Ludwig (S 1 E 2) on BBC1, Wednesday 2 October, 9:00pm

This is a program based on a very interesting premise. There’s a reclusive puzzle solver, James Taylor (David Mitchell) who has a twin brother (John) who goes missing. John’s wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) persuades James to pose as John (who was a police detective) to find out what has happened to him.

So James, pretending to be his brother, blunders his way into the police station and soon finds himself investigating and solving murders, as well as continuing to hunt down clues to find out what has happened to John.

There are six episodes, so my guess is we’ll have 5 murders, all neatly solved, with some sort of big reveal at the end, with two David Mitchells sharing a fish supper and arguing over a chess game they had twenty years ago.

This second episode starts with a recap of episode 1, then we see a chap furtively leaving a grand house. As he vanishes through a door, we hear a snatch of Beethoven. Beethoven? Ludwig van! Ha Ha! CLUE!

For, it being the sort of program it is, we expect clues and red herrings everywhere: for James to follow, Lucy to pursue and for us - the watchers - to be confused by.

(Ha!) Great stuff!

For now, we have left the real world, and are on that precise, fine cusp where comedy, drama, emotion, and mystery intersect. It’s a real tightrope, to mix a metaphor. Get it wrong, and it’s an incoherent mess. 

But Ludwig walks that tightrope adroitly, thanks to an excellent script, unfussy direction and a fine cast. 

David Mitchell plays James as Moss’s (from the IT crowd) older brother. The sort chap who would risk being run over by a bus to pick up a newspaper showing an unsolved crossword puzzle, or do a calculation based on shell density, hardness of water and the weather forecast to know how long - to the nano-second - to boil his egg. And he’d get it right.

Such is his need for symmetry, he straddles white lines when driving - and parking - his car. And, of course, he’s a fussy pedant. Things have to be correct. When he interrupts a business workshop, he gets distracted by a blackboard declaring ‘only a TEAM can win a championship.’

‘That’s not true’ he says, and cites Garry Kasparov, the chess player, promptly getting into a senseless argument about if two people playing chess make up a team. Or is it senseless? Maybe it’s a particularly deep and devious hint?

Nah! It’s just a bit of flim flam to demonstrate the infinite capacity of some people to focus on the trivial…. I think.   

Anna Maxwell Martin, all motherly concern but steely of purpose and with a relentless focus on what matters, is understandably frustrated with his wandering off course. She tells him to deflect other calls on his time with ‘I have a mountain of paperwork!’ Inevitably, that becomes a running joke.

This time, the case he gets involved in concerns a missing person. Remember the chap vanishing to the strains of LUDWIG van Beethoven’s fifth? We can be pretty sure it was him.

Indeed, when James goes sniffing, the trail leads back to the grand house, and as a likely a collection of suspects as you could hope to see, plus one clean concrete urn and something wrong with before and after security camera shots.

And while he is footling around with this, his sister-in-law Lucy is following clues, chasing up John’s contacts. She has a somewhat surreal conversation with an estate agent, which might - or might not - be significant.

By this time, we are seeing clues everywhere, and everyone is a potential suspect, except - of course - James and Lucy …… or maybe … Oh, I don’t know. That’s one of the joys of programs like these: you end up with so many clues - or suspected clues - you are effectively clueless, and end up thinking Miss Marple has killed the vicar with meatloaf in the pantry.

To my mind, ‘Ludwig’ occupies a comfortable spot in the pantheon of recent TV murder mysteries, being the first cousin of the excellent ‘Queens of Mystery’ which I reviewed a month or so back. Both ‘Queens of Mystery’ and ‘Ludwig’ share a quirky sense of humour and a similar structure, of one ongoing missing person investigation while solving a mystery once a week. ‘Taggart’ they are most definitely not.

And if you can’t wait a week, they’re all on BBC iPlayer. So you could raid your fridge, settle down and bing watch the lot while scoffing sausage rolls, cheese cake and Sunday’s left-over trifle.

But not me. Somewhere, deep inside, I feel that’s rather cheating. I still have that small boy within me, watching grainy black and white images of many years ago, when nothing could be recorded at home, unless you pointed your box-brownie at the screen, pressed the button and hoped you’d kept your finger out of the way.

Most certainly, Ludwig is a great watch. Series record? Emphatically yes. I might even watch episode 1 on iPlayer: just to make sure I haven’t missed any clues.

And now, what next?

Ah yes: nearly forgot:

Anna Richardson: Love, Loss & Dementia on Channel 4, Wednesday 2 October, 10:00pm

Being the age I am, remembering things is a constant struggle. Or maybe I’ve always been this way. It’s hard to recall.

I live by lists and electronic reminders. I hung out my washing this morning, and set a 5 o’clock reminder to get it in. And as for shopping lists, I have a system that can loosely be summarised as when you run out (of shredded wheat, toothpaste, corn plasters, whatever), write it down. IMMEDIATELY!!

And in a way, I think, when scrawling ‘Frozen Spinach’ on my little notepad, well, as long as I remember to do this, my marbles are intact. I haven’t dared take on of those online dementia tests, because I think it has questions like ‘name five countries starting with ‘A’.

Australia. Austria. Albania…. oh oh, my brain is starting to slow down …. Alaska? Nope. Azerbaijan, Algeria. Phew. I’m safe, for now.

And the thing is, whenever I have these thoughts, I’m aware I must treat dementia seriously, but usually in my head, I can feel a nervous giggle. The sort of laugh you might give when confronted by a raging bear or a scary ghost.

You want to run away, but you can’t leave your brain behind. It goes with you.

Anna Richardson: Love, Loss & Dementia begins with her visiting her Dad. When she opens the door he’s standing in the hall fiddling with his trouser belt. Anna helps him, saying he’s lost weight, and she’ll have to make another hole.

He has vascular dementia, which causes repeated small strokes, each one damaging the brain. On the wall are pictures of him as a young priest. Vigorous and active, smiling cheerfully.

This contrast between then and now is a constant throughout this program, reminding us of a past that will never come again. There’s Mary and Richard. She’s been caring for him for nine years, watching him slowly getting worse and worse. We hear her on the phone to her doctor. ‘I was actually, for the first time, really quite scared. I’ve put all the knives away. He really didn’t have a clue who I was.’ And while she is talking, we see pictures of them, on a tandem, her in a wedding dress, both smiling and happy.

Anna goes to the dementia research centre and learns dementia is an umbrella term for the damage caused by a range of different diseases. Alzheimer’s being the most common. And by the time dementia appears, that disease has been working on the brain (‘creating abnormalities’ is the term used) for maybe 20 years. Soberingly, it’s compared to late stage cancer, which is untreatable. 

At the clinic, doing tests, is Jordan and his partner, Anya. He’s 29. Amongst other tests, he’s asked to copy a design, draw lines from one number to the next, and add 43 and 78. He does these tests every year. Why? Because he carries a gene that makes it almost certain he’ll die of dementia in his fifties. So he has 20 or 30 years left.

We meet Kirsty and her husband Roy, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 18 months ago. His memory, he says, is pretty much gone. He talks about it almost like a separate entity, that is fast leaving the room. Planning, he says, gets harder and harder. He wants to start a new drug trial, but it keeps getting put off. The death notice, he says, is over my door.

Repeatedly, it is asked: as dementia kills one in three, and the number of families affected is set to increase by 40% in the next fifteen years. So why isn’t more being done now?

But wisely, I think, they do not interview a health minister: the last thing a conscientious, serious, heartfelt program like this needs is a politician slickly making circular non-apologies, blaming the other side and promising something will be done. For - as Anna points out, ‘it’s an invisible illness that we tend to associate with an invisible part of the population, which is older people, and we tend to ignore them anyway.’ Or maybe - right now - it’s not considered a vote-winner, and as long as unpaid family carers pitch in and do the brunt of the work, there’s nothing much to gain, so they promise little and achieve less.

She takes her parents out for a pub lunch, which is a nice lead in to Michaela, in Luton. Her gran has dementia, so Michaela started a fortnightly dementia cafe. A place for those with the disease - and their families - to meet and socialise. It’s very much a family affair. Nieces and nephews by the score, beavering away in the background. I expected to see a stupendously large tea urn, but didn’t. Sheets for word searches and colouring are set out. The atmosphere is convivial.

It is, very obviously, a good, good thing. Michaela funds this herself.

And back with Mary, who we met earlier. Several months must have passed, and she says, in the last week, her world has completely turned upside down. Now, she doesn’t feel safe living in the same house as Richard. Emotionally, she was being completely destroyed.

So she moved Richard into a care home. She describes the day he went, and breaks down. To paraphrase, she said, ‘whatever we did, we thought, this will be the last time we do this.’

When they took him in, he just accepted it. And now he’s gone. Mary at the moment is sleeping in the spare room. She can’t quite face their bedroom. The guilt, she says, is real.

And then we move on to Kayleigh, and her Mum, who has late stage dementia. This is equally heartbreaking. The shrunken body on the bed, eyes open, but blank, or living in another world.  

The stories are getting depressingly similar. The relentless capacity of this disease for destruction, of people, of families, is truly horrendous. There is little to do other than attempt to make them comfortable as they fumble their way to death. Without memory, we are as nothing.

We catchup with 29 year old Jordan and Anya. They’re back at the dementia research centre. They are told that it could be a few more years before he gets the symptoms, but with his input they hope to develop a treatment before then. ‘That’s a potential,’ the prof says ‘over the next few years.’

It sounds like a skinny aspiration, but then I’m not the one grasping at straws. They’re a pleasant young couple. It seems so brutally unfair. 

They get married. We catch snatches of his speech. He says ‘I can’t promise you we’ll grown old together, but I can promise my love for you is eternal. I can’t promise that one day I won’t forget your name, but I can promise I’ll always feel your love.’

And then a last visit to Roy and Kirsty. Roy goes running, pounding along meadow lined cart tracks. Kirsty says they had hopes of a new drug, Lecanemab which is proved to slow cognitive decline by a quarter. It was authorised for people to use, but the NHS said it was too expensive to prescribe. When Roy and Kirsty tried to go private, they were told Roy had a double gene - whatever that it - and so was ineligible.

To conclude, we’re back with Anna and her Dad. She pushes his wheelchair up a hill and into his old church. The tapestry is colourful. He points to a priest without a face. ‘That’s me,’ he says, smiling.

I don’t think I’ll ever again use the word ‘dementia’ in quite the same, casual, offhand way I have in the past. A generic term for - in particular - public figures I don’t like. A catchall for a politician spouting nonsense, or giving a meandering answer to a question they don’t like.

Nor - I hope - will I jokingly refer to my occasional memory hiccup or brain freeze as ‘oh, must be dementia.’

But then it’s always a quandary, isn’t it, to know how well your brain is working. The other day I tried to prove Pythagoras’s theorem about the sides of right angled triangles. I hadn’t done that for over sixty years. I can remember the diagram. Mr Brown, my bald, no-nonsense maths teacher, drew it on the board. A triangle, with squares on the sides, and lines dropping down, and shaded areas. Towards the end, the statement ‘and similarly, we can prove the area of this square here is equal to the area of that rectangle there. QED!’

And d’you know what? I couldn’t prove it. Most annoying. But I don’t think it means my brain has been creating abnormalities for 20 years. It probably just means I’m not as clever as Pythagoras.

After all, when all’s said and done, I maintain this podcast. Must mean something. I think.

(Ha!)

Let’s move on:    

MAFS UK: It’s Official! With Chloe Burrows on E4. Thursday 3 October, 10:05pm

‘MAFS’ - as I mention in the intro, stands for ‘Married at First Sight.’ Which is not a program I have ever seen. 

I did a Google, and there she is, the eponymous Chloe Burrows, gurning away, head tilted, blond hair cascading down. The blurb declares: ‘It’s the official Married at First Sight UK podcast! Join us as we dissect all the drama and debate the juiciest goings-on.’

So, it’s a podcast. Um, and why not.

Chloe sits in an easy chair, in front of a chunky, businesslike microphone on a stand and easily, naturally, talks away. She has a few notes, but seldom appears to refer to them. Her sentences are lucid, fitting as easily together as cheese on a board. Her face is expressive, and she waves her hands about.

There is no doubt about it: she’s a natural. 

I look at my own microphone, bought secondhand from eBay. Slightly larger than a cricket ball, it needs to be put on a table. It now looks puny and insubstantial. I think of the way I type my podcast out, every single word, complete with supposedly improvised diversions and asides. It’s all scripted. Even the occasional grunts of amusement are neatly set down in the right position. (Grunts in amusement) There y’go.

And when I record, I stick like glue to the script. On the wall I have a sheet of paper with the word ‘up’ printed on it, with an arrow pointing to the sky. This is to remind me to vary my voice and give it a more upbeat feeling. Otherwise it drops into a monotonous register dogs can’t hear.

And when I’ve done, staggering to the end of the script, it takes me at least an hour to edit out the fluffs, the coughs, the passing cars, the small people wanting to play hide and seek and when I go off to make tea and toast.

And so I am in awe of Chloe Burrows: she just talks away, so convinced that what she says is of interest, it nearly convinces me as well.

She has a guest, the exotically named Tia Kofi, a drag queen from a different universe from mine. Tia is, like Chloe, at ease behind the mic. They discuss the latest news in MAFSworld. Who has been paired with who. Experts. The friendship zone, the honesty box. I think they simply forget they’re being recorded, and are a couple of fans chatting about something they love.

Later they are joined by Charlie, another bouncy, bubbly girl, who was on the show and got married to someone called Eve, as far as I can tell. And then it all went wrong after a couple of days, so she quit.

Frankly, I don’t know what to make of all this. The individual words make sense, but the sentences do not. I get the outline, after all ‘married at first sight’ is self-explanatory, and the mention of experts makes me think of arranged marriages, but beyond that I’m floundering. I feel like a hippo listening to people talking about cricket.

The basic problem is that this MAFS podcast, so casually, slickly produced, is not trying to convert me into a MAFS fan. It assumes I already am. 

But I’m not. I’m like a person in a train, looking into the gardens and through the windows of houses. Sometimes, the things you see are akin to your own life, and you know what is going on. But in this house, the MAFS house, nothing really makes sense. People are doing strange things. The logic is impenetrable.

And when push comes to shove, I don’t care. I’m happy for my train to move on. I cannot dredge up the required effort to understand it better. I wish them all well: it would be extremely sad if there wasn’t enough room in the universe for my world and theirs. 

But as for me, understanding it? Well - as they always say - if a thing isn’t worth doing, don’t do it at all.

And that mangled proverb concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Next time, I will review:

Gilmore Girls (S1 E2: The Lorelais’ First Day at Chilton) on ITV2, Wednesday 9 October, 4:00pm

Wheeler Dealers (S 17 E 20: MGB Roadster) on Quest, Wednesday 9 October, 6:00pm and

Joker (2019) on ITV1, Thursday 10 October, 10:45pm

I sort of intended to have a theme this time. Maybe romance, or sport or something or other. But no, I’ve gone eclectic again. ‘Gilmore Girls’ has been hovering around for a while now, so I thought, why not? Likewise - sort of - Wheeler Dealers. And as for ‘Joker’ well, I read a review several years ago, and it sounded extremely tedious. Well, seeing at it home at least means I can go off and clean the sink or something while it burbles away in the background.    

As ever, you can contact me via email to contact@IReviewFreeview.com or through the website IReviewFreeview.com, or from where you normally get your podcasts. Let me know what you think and - of course - if you want me to cast my beady eye on a particular program: film, documentary, whatever, then let me know.

And if you want to know what I’ll be reviewing next time, click on the page ‘What’s up next.’ 

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.