Ludwig and Lucy Worsley Investigates

Wow, I’m actually watching some of the BBC’s own current (ish) output. Like in person Saturday shopping, this was a staple years ago, and has dwindled away in recent times.

I like Lucy Worsley overall, but the latest Investigates isn’t breaking significant new ground - it’s slim pickings. The one on Jack the Ripper copiously avoided yet more speculation on the perpetrator - hooray! - and was more about audience appetite for reaction to lurid crime reporting; it told you a bit more about the victims’ broken lives. There was something pulled out about the scale of the harrying of the north. There was some mildly interesting background on Guy (“Guido”) Fawkes’s military career fighting the Spanish.

I’d recommend Ludvig if only for Anna Maxwell-Martin, who is by far the best and most believable thing in the show, and (of all things) the design. Although the look is fresh and diverse, please check your disbelief at the bar for what follows. Wear your comedy-drama hat as none of this is going to stand up in court.

If I have this straight, your husband / identical cop brother has disappeared and your response (as Mr Bean meets Inspector Morse) is - checks notes again - to assume his identity as said cop to look for clues?

Mark from Peep Show is a bit older now and is fleetingly established as a master setter of puzzles - and uses these skills to deduce a murder suspect from an Agatha Christie style collection, each of whom might be hiding something. The historic city tour group set-up is borrowed from Morse; the tower block building site with just six people at work on it was at least, er, original.

We’re up to episode 4 and the hunt for clues to decrypt the messages left by the missing man has slowed to a crawl. Why? Because like in 1980/90s Oxford, people in Cambridge will just keep on getting themselves murdered, thus sucking our hero in along with his mysterious side-kick and Keystone junior entourage.

I shall watch to the end, knowing that series 2 is on the way and therefore the missing man will continue to elude us. I hope the Beeb continues to have new successes like this.