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RTÉ News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Irish-produced drama Mix Tape and the musical love letter
BBC drama Mix Tape, a tale of star-crossed lovers who bond over music, is coming to RTÉ soon but can it reinvigorate the lost art of the mix tape as musical love letter? It was a teenage rite of passage and also what the kids now call a major flex. Making a mixtape was a labour of love, a musical way into the heart of the one you fancied and also a proud artefact of just how very good your taste in music really was. Carefully pressing the right buttons on your twin tape deck, choosing the tracks of your hopes and dreams and lovingly inscribing the song titles and artists on the inlay card became something of a minor artform back in what some people probably correctly call simpler times. Van Morrison called it the inarticulate speech of the heart and for millions of seventies, eighties and nineties kids, the mixtape was the musical equivalent of the love letter - the spark for countless nervous conversations and maybe even debates. God knows, I still have a box of them in my spare room. And no, they weren't all retuned, un-played and unloved. These days, of course, you will see wizened old Boomers and Gen Xers posting tiresome memes on wizened old Facebook (it's where the adults hang out, OK?) of cassette tapes accompanied by a pencil. If you know, you know. This, apparently, is the modern age's equivalent of uncovering ancient runes and explaining arcane rituals to digital nativists. In our era of instant gratification, even the noughties phenomenon of the CD burn has given way to soulless Spotify playlists and causal YouTube shares on mobile phones. As ever, something has been lost but with a new generation turning to vinyl and even the cassette format making its own comeback, can the actual physical mixtape become a tribune of love once again? Perhaps recent BBC drama Mix Tape (ta-dah!), which is due to air on RTÉ soon, will inspire a fresh flood of spooling polyester plastic film coated with magnetic material as musical missives. Perhaps not. In any case, the fabled mixtape is the jumping off point for the four-part series. It is the overwrought story of two music mad Sheffield kids, with the very Irish names of Daniel O'Toole and Alison Connor, who meet as teens at a house party in 1989. The young Daniel (who looks like a cross between Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. and a young Neil Morrissey) is a music obsessive and he wins bookish Alison's heart with his impressive knowledge of Cabaret Voltaire. Then again, we later learn that his favourite Bowie song is Modern Love. Their first dance is to Joy Division's immortal Love Will Tear Us Apart, their first kiss is to The Jesus & Mary Chain, and when their bedroom fumbling goes much further, they DO IT to the strains of In-Between Days by The Cure. Oh, the drama! Oh, the great basslines! There isn't enough of The Fall featured in Mix Tape for my liking but music is the spine of young Dan and Ali's romance and it plays out the beats and missed heart beats of puppy love (thankfully, no songs by Donny Osmond were used in the making of this programme). Daniel slips his mixtapes into Alison's school bag and she hands him lovingly curated TDKs on the bus to school. We hear The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Velvet Underground and The Stone Roses. All very good, indeed. But just as their teen crush turns to full-blown romance, Alison vanishes from Sheffield, leaving Daniel feeling like a Morrissey song. It's an intriguing premise and the drama plays out in a dual timelines and dual time zones, making it a lot like Sliding Doors meets Sleepless in Seattle - a Proustian rush of 'what ifs' and 'if onlys' played out longingly in verboten mobile phone texts and mutual cyber stalking and the songs of their lost youth. Normal People it is not. However, it is fraught stuff. We follow Daniel and Alison, who is now a successful novelist living in Syndey and married to a total eejit, and move between their teenage romance in 1989 Sheffield and the modern-day reality of their adult relationships living on opposite sides of the world. Daniel and his wife aren't exactly singing from the same hymn sheet back in Sheffield. He now works as a music journalist but never seems to do any actual work (so, that makes sense) and he is toying with writing a book about some great lost music figurehead, like Daniel Johnson or Nick Drake. Mix Tape is a very Irish affair. The four-part drama was originated and developed by Dublin-based production company Subotica, who have previously produced North Sea Connection and The Boy That Never Was, with help from Ireland's generous Section 481 Film and Television tax incentive and the support of Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland and Screen Australia among others. It was also filmed entirely on location in Dublin and Sydney. And so, the former steel town of Sheffield is played by Dublin's Liberties (I was tickled to see that some of it was shot on the very street where I live), while location filming was also completed in Australia. However, things get seriously meta when the young Alison actually moves to actual Dublin and young Daniel nearly has a whitey on the actual Ha'penny Bridge when he sees her with another bloke. Strangely, no U2 was used in the making of this programme. Based on the novel by Jane Sanderson and adapted for television by Irish writer Jo Spain, the show stars Teresa Palmer as the adult Alison and Jim Sturgess as the adult Daniel and Rory Walton-Smith as young Daniel and Florence Hunt as young Alison. And here's the thing, the actors who play the younger versions of our protagonists are so much better than the anguished grown-up versions, who spend most of the time moping about like extras in a Cure video. Of course, the whole thing reminded me of that minor noughties indie hit about an estranged couple haggling over their shared record collection in the same way rich people haggle over their condo in Bel Air or their D4 pied-à-terre. If you're looking for a good music-based romance, Stephen Frears' film of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is still your best. Mix Tape is a mite too tortured and joyless but it does have two major flexes - those Dublin locations and the actual music. It also asks an eternal question posed by music obsessives in every time line and time zone - can the songs that sound-tracked our young lives and loves ever really sound the same again?
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Review: Mix Tape is bit of a mixed bag while Bookish combines cosiness, craft and class
This week saw the conclusion of Mix Tape ( BBC 2), a drama that follows its protagonists Dan and Alison across two timelines. One covers the beginnings of their teen romance, amid the grim glamour of late-1980s Sheffield . The other timeline, many years later, finds them living entirely separate lives in near middle-age. Teenage Dan and Alison are fresh-faced sweethearts, schoolmates who bond over music and angst, exchanging devastatingly cool mix tapes featuring a roll call of new wave bangers. Older Dan and Alison have grown into writers – he is a music journalist, she is a novelist - separated by 10,000 miles, but united by a sense of ennui and a sudden urge to reminisce about their time together. Will they reunite and attempt to rekindle that old flame? Well, yes, but the show is predicated on us pretending we don't know this from the outset, so let's keep that mystery alive. While watching the show's first two episodes , broadcast last week, I took the latter timeline to be 'the present', but that left me in a bit of a muddle. The decor, clothing and phones seemed broadly contemporary, but the burden of maths forced me to reckon with the fact that this 'nowadays' section must be set about 10 years ago, or else our heroes are looking extremely sprightly for 55-year-olds. I tried to confirm this by freeze-framing a shot of Facebook used in the show, which does suggest it takes place in 2015/16. (If this is true, then I guess my first clue should have been that every adult in this programme is still using Facebook). READ MORE This is, after all, a friend-request romance, that genre of drama in which events are set into motion by social media notifications. In this case, it is when Older Dan, still living in Sheffield, is alerted to Alison's massive new book deal. We learn he has not heard of her for many years, because she lives in a different TV show that's set in Australia. There, she drinks balcony wines with her handsome doctor husband in their showroom apartment, where they fret over the behaviour of their daughter, whose teenage rebelliousness chimes somewhat with Alison's own. In the years since she stopped exchanging mix tapes with Dan, she has also become fully Australian, a detail that may seem a little convenient given the actor in question is Australian herself. Speaking as someone who moved to Dublin for college and thereafter developed a traitorous dollop of Leinster atop my Derry twang, I cannot possibly comment. A lot of this show reminded me of my own life at 18. Not merely because I made desperately try-hard mix CDs for girls I fancied, but because I did so on the mean streets of Ireland's capital, where all of the mix-tape era Sheffield scenes were filmed. I don't want to mire this article in tedious pedantry about a TV show's shooting locations, not least since much was made of it when the show debuted last week, but it is unavoidably comic to witness establishing shots of Yorkshire's urban exteriors cut directly to the pristine streets of Ranelagh or Rathmines. Things entered an even more discombobulating realm in this week's episodes when we discover that Young Alison subsequently moved to actual Dublin to work in a pub in Temple Bar. Having journeyed there to find her, Young Dan spots her in a tryst with another man and takes an emotional moment on the Ha'penny Bridge. At that point, action cuts abruptly to his older self back in Sheffield, a juxtaposition which may have carried more declarative oomph were it not very clearly filmed 20 minutes' walk from said bridge, at the Dean Hotel on Harcourt Street. [ The Narrow Road to the Deep North review: Unflinchingly savage war tale starring Ciarán Hinds is a gruelling watch Opens in new window ] All such quibbles aside, it's quite watchable in an emotional, tear-jerky way, even if its plodding pace didn't raise my heartbeat too often. The soundtrack is certainly great, but the show chooses to presume as fact, rather than demonstrate how or why, the music they fell in love with was earth-shatteringly, groundbreakingly important. The paper-thin characterisations of our heroes' respective partners also seem explicitly geared toward giving us, the audience, license to let said spouses be discarded like decrepit band merch. 'You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape,' Alison tells her daughter in a car ride, which is a neat summation of the show's themes of love and art transcending time and distance. It does, however, seem like resolutely useless advice to give a 16-year-old girl, since the curation of mix tapes should be as relatable to a teenager as talk of whale oil lamps or penny farthing maintenance. Perhaps kids were still doing this in 2015. It's all so long ago, I can't quite remember. Trekking further into olden times, we find period murder mystery Bookish (U&Alibi) – or, rather, I found it, but you may still need directions. That's because Mark Gatiss (co-creator of the BBC's Benedict Cumberbatch-minting blockbuster, Sherlock) has returned to crime with this caperish series for U&Alibi, a channel with such an impressively prolix history of rebrands, I'll offer a brief summary for the uninformed. Originally launched as UK Arena in 1997, it was then renamed UK Drama, then UKTV Drama, then Alibi and, as of last November, the gloriously inscrutable 'U&Alibi'. Since the fourth of those five brandings, the channel has focused solely on crime, mostly British-made listings-fillers culled from the yellowing pages of decades-old copies of the Radio Times. Bookish, created, co-written and starring Gatiss, is one of the few full originals they've produced, and its premise seems curiously familiar; in period London, eccentric bookseller Gabriel Book – it's that kind of show – supplements his day job by solving murders alongside his wife, Trottie. He bears a letter from Churchill that grants him license to step into crime scenes and intrude on interrogations, in the manner of some sort of London-based amateur genius sleuth who works with the constabulary – a scenario I'm sure has some form of literary precedent I can't quite put my finger on. The action takes place in 1946, rather than the Victorian era, although you may never quite banish the whiff of Baker Street from your nostrils while watching. [ What does the future hold for popular BBC show Masterchef? Opens in new window ] Gatiss is capable as ever in the lead, waspish and arch without quite tipping over into panto territory, and thankfully given more interiority to work with as the show goes on. The script is sharp and Bookish doles out its soft-scoop mysteries with a restraint that's admirable, if occasionally frustrating. Fans of Gatiss's work with League of Gentlemen or his Ghost Stories For Christmas may sometimes wish, as I did, for something a little nastier than the cosier-than-thou fare on offer here. This is, for the most part, glacially gentle programming, albeit suffused with just enough quirk, charm and subliminal darkness, to raise it above the duvet-lined trenches of, say, Death in Paradise, or – God forbid – the treacly, incident-averse morass of Heartbeat. For all its tropey trappings, Bookish is more cleverly written, and a good deal more handsomely mounted, than you might expect from a channel that sounds like a wifi password. U&Alibi may have just cracked the riddle of combining cosiness, craft and class. Turns out the answer was hiring Mark Gatiss, but you needn't be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out.
Time Out
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
BBC's ‘Mix Tape' Soundtrack: Full Tracklist of Songs by Episode
One of those decades-spanning love stories that puts you through the emotional wringer, Mix Tape is a perfect binge for anyone who still wistfully remembers One Day (Netflix series, book or movie). And in a twist of fate, the BBC/Binge four-parter also stars Jim Sturgess, the lead in the 2011 One Day movie, as another lovelorn character who holds a torch for an old flame from his teenage years into his middle years. Sturgess plays Daniel and The Fall Guy 's Teresa Palmer is his long-time crush Alison in a music-soaked romantic drama that follows the pair from their partying youths (where they're played by Bridgerton 's Florence Hunt and newcomer Rory Walton-Smith) to wobbly married lives with other people on different continents. As its title implies, the bond of music – especially alternative anthems of the '80s and '90s – offers a motif for the pair's enduring connection throughout the series. And what a soundtrack it is, reflecting the music scenes of its two cities – Sheffield and Sydney – in fairly iconic style. In common with the novel on which its based, the show packs in a crate load of tunes: from Aussie bands like 1927 and The Church, to British post-punk legends like The Psychedelic Furs and The Cure, and Sheffield hometown heroes Arctic Monkeys and Richard Hawley. Listen out for the great Nick Drake too. Here's the soundtrack in full: EPISODE 1 Fool's Gold – The Stone Roses Home is the Range – The Comsat Angels Bizarre Love Triangle – New Order Fluorescent Adolescent – Arctic Monkeys Sweet Tooth Outlaw – The Psychs Prize – Kitchens of Distinction Northern Sky – Nick Drake Late Again - ALWAYS Road – Nick Drake Outro – Jackson Reid Briggs & The Heaters Under The Milky Way - The Church Close To Me - The Cure Stephanie Says - The Velvet Underground Some Candy Talking - The Jesus and Mary Chain EPISODE 2 Hit the North – The Fall That's When I Think of You - 1927 Love My Way - The Psychedelic Furs Lovesong - The Cure Tainted Love - Gloria Jones The Deepest Sighs, The Frankest Shadow s - Gang of Youths EPISODE 3 Big Jet Plane - Angus and Julia Stone Something Is - Richard Hawley Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division Bizarre Love Triangle - Frente! EPISODE 4 I Fall Apart - Rory Gallagher She is Everything – Blue In Heaven Background Check - Display Homes I Love You - The Brian Jonestown Massacre Live It Up - Mental As Anything Lovesong - The Cure How can I watch Mix Tape? All four episodes are on BBC iPlayer now. The best TV and streaming shows of 2025 (so far). The 101 most romantic movies of all time.
Irish Independent
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
What to watch on TV and streaming today: Trainwreck – PI Moms, Better Call Saul and Hell is a City
Live Uefa Women's Euro 2025 RTÉ2, 7.30pm The first semi-final takes place tonight in Geneva; the second is happening in Zurich on Wednesday, with teams battling it out for a place in next Sunday's final. Mix Tape BBC Two, 9pm The Sheffield-set but Dublin-shot drama's penultimate episode begins in 1989 with an insight into how Alison's home life went from bad to worse. Then, in 2015, Daniel is horrified by her story, and tries to deal with her memory of the one night they had together. Concludes tomorrow. Better Call Saul TG4, 10.30pm As Mike attempts to get back in his family's good books, Kim feels uncomfortable giving Jimmy an interesting proposition. Plus, Gus realises a sacrifice now may help him reap dividends later. Trainwreck: P.I. Moms Netflix, streaming now This weekly episodic seems to have been going on forever, and I never want it to end. In 2010, Lifetime launched a reality show about soccer moms moonlighting as private investigators. As secrets surface and criminal accusations mount, both the show and its subjects spiral toward disaster. Hell is a City Film4, 11am Tough Manchester-set thriller starring Stanley Baker as a hard-bitten police detective on the trail of a violent escaped criminal who is planning to rob a bookmaker. The impressive supporting cast includes John Crawford, Donald Pleasence and Billie Whitelaw. Amy Bradley is Missing Netflix, streaming now In 1998, Amy Bradley vanished from a cruise ship without a trace. Decades later, sightings and speculation still swirl. This three-parter explores this haunting cold case and her family's fight to bring her home. Krays: London Gangsters Prime Video, streaming now Twins Reggie and Ronnie ruled London's underworld for two decades — and had their story portrayed by the Kemps to boot. Through prison recordings, this documentary reveals the powerful bond behind their dubious legacy. Untamed Netflix, streaming now If you've already mainlined all three series of Sneaky Pete, it's OK — Netflix has teed up this new Eric Bana and Sam Neill (both looking suitably at home in rangers uniforms) vehicle for you. Set in Yosemite, the National Parks agents are caught between a brutal crime, the wilderness, and themselves. Ironically, in Trump's America, they'd have probably been laid off. Surf Girls: International Prime Video, streaming now From breakout star Ewe Wong to Olympian Sol Aguirre, follow four female surfing athletes as they face personal hurdles, cultural expectations, and fierce competition. Imagine saving enough to buy an apartment only to face financial ruin while sandwiched between mysteriously noisy floors. It's South Korean, so Woo-seong's neighbourinos could be anyone (or anything).
Daily Mirror
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Viewers 'addicted' to new BBC drama that tops streaming chart days after debut
New romantic drama Mix Tape has proven to be popular with TV fans and is now topping BBC's most-watched chart The BBC 's latest drama has proven to be popular with TV fans, who have said they are already "addicted" to the programme. Mix Tape, a four-part TV series, aired on BBC Two recently and is now available to stream via iPlayer in full. The show has quickly climbed up to the top of the BBC's streaming list, overtaking programmes like EastEnders and Humans in the process. Mix Tape stars Teresa Palmer and Jim Sturgess as Alison and Daniel, who enjoyed a romance as teenagers before parting ways. The series sees them reconnect as adults and revisit their connection. "Years on from their teen romance in 80s Sheffield, music brings them back together - was this the love they were meant to have? Romance and heartbreak with a banging soundtrack," the BBC description of Mix Tape reads. The cast is also made up of Florence Hunt and Rory Walton-Smith, who play young versions of Alison and Daniel, as well as Ben Lawson, Julia Savage and Helen Behan. Other actors who make appearances in the series include mark O'Halloran, Jonathan Harden, Alexis Rodney, Sam Reuben, Sara Soulié, Chika Ikogwe and Jacqueline McKenzie. Mix Tape is an adaptation by Jo Spain of the novel of the same title by Jane Sanderson. The show is directed by Lucy Gaffy and written by Jo. Fans have been loving Mix Tape, with many leaving glowing reviews about the four-part series. On IMDb, Mix Tape has an average score of 7.7 from 666 user ratings. One fan said that they were "addicted" to the show, as another added: "I have had to binge watch it because I couldn't stop watching it." A second said: "Just wanted to review this amazing new drama series. I have had to binge watch it because I couldn't stop watching it. This is one of the best series I've watched in a while. It got me hooked and my husband has loved it too." Another fan's review included: "We knew nothing about this going in, other than 'you never forget the boy who makes you your first mixtape'. Enjoyed the short series so much, perfect weekend watch." Elsewhere, somebody else said: "This is the best limited series I have seen for many years. In fact it is a high quality movie presented in four parts. The story is interesting, but it's execution is what makes this show a 10."
