'David Mitchell's Ludwig is one of the best TV shows of 2024'

When the time comes for us to name the best new telly of the year, one show will surely be close to the top of everyone’s lists. Which is funny, because when the BBC slipped David Mitchell’s Ludwig out with very little fanfare on a wet Wednesday night in early autumn I assumed the people upstairs didn't have that much faith in it.

For a start, this cosy comedy drama about a puzzle-solving accidental detective (from creator Mark Brotherhood) screamed put me in the cosy Sunday night slot after Countryfile and Antiques Roadshow.

It’s a testament to the brilliance of the show that despite that scheduling snub, Ludwig now finds itself in a battle with the Great British Bake Off to be the second most popular programme on British television behind that dancing show.

Knowing the BBC, the people in charge will no doubt be whispering that they intended all along for it to be a word-of-mouth, sleeper hit designed to drag the streaming crowd to the BBC iPlayer. Fair play to them if that was the case. The problem they now face is that having created a monster hit, they must solve a puzzle that would test even Ludwig himself: Where does the show go from here?

Having already blitzed the full series in one delightful sitting, I’d be amazed if the BBC does not announce at least one more run once the finale has aired on terrestrial TV on Wednesday night. It’s a superb piece of television which manages to achieve the perfect blend of comedy and drama.

It’s part Jonathan Creek, part Inside No.9 and part Death In Paradise, with some Richard Osman/Agatha Christie and Inspector Morse thrown in for good measure. In fact, there are so many nods to Morse — classic car, classical music, dreaming spires — it almost feels like some kind of Cambridge fightback is brewing.

Read more: Will Ludwig return for a second series?

The biggest thing in Ludwig's favour is that the main character is the role David Mitchell was born to play. Mainly because he’s pretty much playing David Mitchell, had David Mitchell suddenly been forced to become a murder detective in his late middle-age.

The only twist that could have made this proposition even more appealing would have been if they’d somehow managed to cast his Would I Lie To You? sparring partner Bob Mortimer as his sleuthing sidekick. (Now there’s an idea for series two. Unless, of course, Bob is already working on his own crime drama about a fisherman detective who solves crimes on the riverbank.)

Mitchell is so captivating in the role he almost single-handedly allows us to indulge in the vast suspension of belief that the show's frankly ludicrous premise requires.

Mitchell plays John Taylor (AKA Ludwig), a crossword-setting genius who has been happily living the precisely ordered life of a Beethoven-loving loner until one evening he receives a bizarre and worrying phone call from his identical twin brother’s wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin).

Once Lucy has persuaded him to get into a waiting taxi, and after he has travelled the 145 miles to her home in Cambridge, she explains that his brother DCI James Taylor has gone missing. All she wants John to do is pretend to be James for a day and infiltrate his CID unit to find out what has happened.

Read more: Ludwig delights viewers who demand a second series

Luckily for John — and, I suspect, Mitchell — James also has a beard and a side parting, so that aspect of the transformation is fairly straightforward.

“I’ll just be in and out, right?” John says, after finally agreeing to Lucy’s scheme. Yeah, good luck with that. It’s a six-part series, mate.

Beard aside, maintaining the deception proves challenging for John. This results in a panicked call to Lucy on his 20-year-old Nokia brick. The ensuing exchange perfectly captures the joy of this programme and the sharpness of Mark Brotherhood’s writing.

“I’m going to prison aren’t I? I’m impersonating a police officer!” John yells.

“But he’s your brother,” Lucy replies calmly. “That’s really not the legal loophole you think it is!”

Amazingly, his missing brother’s fellow officers seem to fall for the ruse, which suggests either James is more like John than we’d imagined or that they’re all in on some massive corruption scandal. Or I guess it could just be that our police force isn’t recruiting the brains it once did.

Anyway, this collective gullibility somehow results in John fitting seamlessly into the team and solving all manner of puzzling murders over the course of the next five episodes — with some marvellous cameos from the likes of Felicity Kendall and Sir Derek Jacobi along the way — while also trying to work out what has happened to James.

By the end of the series, aided by the clues in James’s secret wallpaper-wrapped notebook — which are written in a code that only John can decipher, obviously — John appears to be getting somewhere. However, his cover has been blown. This brings me back to the second series conundrum.

I’d say the production company has two options. One, it can quickly tie up James’s loose ends and, with him out of the picture, we can simply watch John solving weekly crimes in his new role as a police consultant. In other words, the Jonathan Creek route.

Two, it can continue to combine the weekly crime-solving with John’s side investigation into the corruption James had begun to uncover. In other words, the Line of Duty route.

Read more: Will Line of Duty return for season 7?

If it was up to me I’d go with option two for one more series max, and follow that up with option one for as many series as David Mitchell wants to make.

Well, if Death In Paradise can manage to keep the same formula going for 14 series and counting, Ludwig ought to be good for double figures at least.

Ludwig is streaming in full on BBC iPlayer.