If you didn’t get your fill of tearing up at Jim Sturgess in 2011’s One Day, he has a new heartbreaking romance to fill the hours.
Mix Tape has arrived on BBC iPlayer this week, with all four episodes of what has been described as a ‘perfect summer treat’ now ready and waiting.
The show sees Sturgess’s Daniel reunite with Alison (Teresa Palmer) years after they dated as teenagers, with plenty of nostalgic needle-drops (Joy Division, The Cure).
The four-part Irish-Australian drama follows two timelines: Alison and Daniel (with Florence Hunt and Rory Walton-Smith as their younger selves) as lovestruck teenagers in the 1980s and the pair in the present day after they went their separate ways.
In the former, we see Dan first spot Alison from across the room at a house party in Sheffield. As you did then, they get to know each other over – show title incoming – mix tapes, hence the many good music cues.
Those feelings first sparked in the 80s lie unresolved in the present day and the show becomes a question of whether these crazy no-longer-kids can make it work as adults instead.
Based on Jane Sanderson’s novel of the same name, Dan has wound up a Sheffield-based music journalist while Alison is a bestselling novelist living in Australia.
Dan sends Alison a friend request years later and the pair reconnect, to touching results.
Filmed on location in Sydney and Dublin, Mix Tape won the South by Southwest film festival TV Spotlight Audience Award this year.
The show was described as ‘the perfect summer treat’ by the BBC’s head of programme acquisitions Sue Deeks, ahead of the romance’s arrival on the Beeb’s streaming service this week.
What other dramas can you watch for free?
- Little Fires Everywhere. The story follows ‘the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and an enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives’. (C4)
- Shardlake. The series follows Hughes’ character Matthew Shardlake, a fictional 16th-century lawyer who has been asked to solve a mysterious murder at a monastery. (ITVX)
- The Shadow. This haunting crime drama follows a young journalist who’s warned by a beggar that she will kill a man sometime in the future. (C4)
The show already aired in Australia earlier this year, after which viewers shared their emotional response to Alison and Daniel’s story.
Taking to Google reviews, Dale Jordan described the show as one of ‘achingly sad themes’ and said it had been ‘beautifully made’.
‘Gatsby-esque hope and longing – highly recommended,’ they wrote.
Justine Thorneloe wrote to say they had already finished the series and that the fourth and final episode left them ‘in tears’.
‘Heart warming tale that stretched across time and continents, complimented with an outstanding ‘mixtape’, reviving memories of times past,’ wrote Matthew Farrelly.
Mix Tape is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
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