Will have a look at this. Just binge watched Monsters on net flix. About the 2 young brothers who murdered their parents. True story ,good watch.
Unfortunately - for David Mitchell - he's the second funniest person in his household though it could be the third as I don't know how funny his new born is. His wife's review from the Telegraph... All the reviews of BBC One’s big new Wednesday-night detective drama Ludwig (and there are many; the show trends on social media and some papers have covered it three or four times) say that “David Mitchell plays himself as usual”. The series has been widely applauded and garlanded with stars, with reviewers saying how pleased they are to see “David Mitchell being David Mitchell”, but they all agree he is “not a transformative actor”. What they don’t realise is that at home, he walks with a limp and speaks with a pronounced Welsh accent. I assume that’s what they’re talking about, isn’t it, different voices and mannerisms and that sort of thing? That he doesn’t deliver the big drum roll you get before a performance by David Tennant or Martin Compston: will they be Scottish or not? Or the old excitement for Daniel Day-Lewis, as the opening credits rolled on a new film: how many eyes/legs/stone will he have lost? My own favourite is Nicolas Cage whose approach to a role, I’ve always assumed, is to shout: “Take me to a warehouse full of costumes, jewellery and weird shoes, give me two bottles of whisky, lock me in for 24 hours and whatever I come out wearing, that’s the character!” You don’t get so much of that with David Mitchell. Or so people think, but I remember him performing in full Gothic drag with a falsetto, hairpiece and lipstick. (Long-term fans will be muttering “Ah yes, the Mrs Danvers sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look,” but actually no, it was a private incident.) In sitcoms and comedy dramas, he does tend – even as William Shakespeare in Upstart Crow – to play men who have loosely RP English accents, with which they express their vulnerabilities. And so he does in this hot new crime drama as John Taylor, a puzzle compiler and social loner who sets crosswords under the name of “Ludwig”, but is forced by circumstance to masquerade as a policeman. I say “new”. It’s been in my life for quite a long time. It was supposed to be filmed in 2023 but had to be postponed after I ruined the careful production plan by getting pregnant. That’s also why I’ve been away from this column for several months, and if you don’t know what that might have to do with the cast of Ludwig, I’ll save you a Google: it’s a new NHS initiative whereby, to compensate for the doctor shortage, you can nominate a comedian to be at your side during labour. Bradley Walsh had changed his number again, so I chose David Mitchell. But Ludwig is a show that might have been designed to suit me, even if its schedule hadn’t had to be. I have spent years (and the forewords to at least two Only Connect companion quiz books) discussing how the nation’s love of word and number puzzles comes from the same place as its love of crime fiction. Wherever you are on the spectrum, you cannot but be soothed by the solution of a crossword or a murder, all loose ends tied up: it’s the illusion of being able to impose order on chaos. For many people, that is lightly pleasing, for others it’s genuinely therapeutic, and for some of us it’s a goddamn psychological necessity. For as long as I can remember, I’ve reached for a pack of cards at the first sign of trouble, counting and calculating with imaginary decks if I haven’t got a real one. When my father was dying, my brother and I completed crossword after crossword. Ludwig makes clear that the young John Taylor embraced puzzles as a coping strategy for his awkward personality and a particular childhood trauma, which might be the most relatable trait I’ve come across in a character since Magwitch ate a whole pork pie at one sitting. Doing Only Connect, I’ve met hundreds of fellow puzzlers with high IQs and uneasy minds, many of whom have felt like outsiders. Doesn’t everyone, sometimes? If you are of that bent, the differences between David Mitchell’s Shakespeare (a hot-blooded man of intellectual confidence but class anxiety, scorned by peers posher yet stupider than he), Mark Corrigan from Peep Show (a cold fish gripped by fears of financial and domestic failure) and John Taylor (who is at peace in an idyllic-looking life of crunching toast and devising puzzles, ruined only when obliged to mix with other people) are very pronounced. Mistaking these three for each other is a bit like saying that all Chinese people look the same. Nevertheless the critics, like John Taylor himself, clearly enjoy the familiar, since they’ve raved about the lead performance even as they say it’s “another variation of David Mitchell” (The Times) and a critic in this very paper claimed: “He couldn’t play hard-bitten or sexy or a northerner or someone who wears jeans.” I’m not sure that he couldn’t play that but I think it’s fair to say he probably wouldn’t. Unless it was all four at once, for a sketch. Camilla Long, for The Sunday Times, wrote that Ludwig is “utterly delightful”, even though David Mitchell himself is a “stumbling, bearded marsupial with goggling, night-vision eyes who writes tip-toeing columns about the Lib Dems in The Observer”. High praise indeed! God help us if she hadn’t liked it. Luckily all the reviewers did, and the show seems to be very successful. Which is good news for Mitchell, as I hear he’s got an extra mouth to feed and his wife has been bunking off work for bloody ages.
