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How many love stories have started with a Spotify playlist? Surely fewer than those that began with a personalised cassette, full of painstakingly recorded songs and handwritten track listings.
An exchange of such carefully curated compilations sparks a romance that endures decades and spans hemispheres in the nostalgia-tinged drama Mix Tape. Acquired by the BBC from Australian streamer Binge, the four-part series follows excitable young lovers turned wistful middle-agers across two interwoven timelines set almost three decades apart.
The first plays out in late 1980s Sheffield, where teenagers Dan (Rory Walton-Smith) and Alison (Florence Hunt) first lock eyes at a house party and dance to New Order. Music is their shared language, songs by The Cure and The Velvet Underground giving shape to their emotions and colour to their dreams of a life beyond the city.
Cut to the mid-2010s and Dan (now played by Jim Sturgess) is still in Sheffield, sweaty living-room parties now replaced by couples dinners and throwback tunes played on expensive hi-fi systems. A freelance music critic and aspiring author, he’s shaken out of his comfortable middle-class married life by news of a novel written by a certain former schoolmate now living in Australia. Over in Sydney, Alison (Teresa Palmer) is doing press for her acclaimed debut; her Yorkshire accent is gone, her past buried, until a song sent by a first love transports her back to a bedroom on the other side of the world.
The details of how and why the high-school sweethearts lost touch becomes clearer as the flashbacks get darker. A sequence of traumatic incidents sees heady romance give way to numbness and heartache. This storyline becomes overladen with one too many sorrows, but it does better at capturing the intermingled excitement and anxiety of young love than the flash-forward strand treats mid-life malaise, longing and regret.
With stilted writing and weak chemistry, Dan and Alison’s bittersweet reunion in Australia and the ensuing will-they-won’t-they narrative is anticlimactic and unrewarding. Instead of a grown-up drama that meaningfully examines the relationship between past and present, romance and illusion, we get an increasingly trite story that pits “true love” against obstacles such as incompatible spouses and meddlesome parents. Slo-mos and plinky-plonk background piano only exacerbate the mawkishness. At least the soundtrack of 1980s classics has the makings of a decent mixtape.
★★☆☆☆
On BBC2 and iPlayer from 9pm on July 15
