At the heart of Ludwig is John Taylor, an accomplished puzzle-setter who is whisked away from his solitary lifestyle by his sister-in-law. She tasks him with uncovering what happened to his detective twin-brother James, who has mysteriously disappeared leaving nothing but a brief note commanding his wife and son to leave home immediately. Being identical, John assumes his brother’s identity to gain access to his office at work in order to solve the mystery. But his efforts keep getting inconveniently delayed by murders. To his surprise, John finds that he has an extraordinary talent for solving murders. He does however lack the tact and training needed to deal with both victims and suspects, which is where the show’s tickling humour comes from.

“my seventy-year old father insisted on watching it on Wednesdays, as aired by the BBC”

I watched the first two episodes of Ludwig with my parents. The whole series was put on BBC iPlayer immediately after the release of its first episode, but my seventy-year old father insisted on watching it on Wednesdays, as aired by the BBC. As irritating as I found it waiting seven days to find out what was going to happen next, there was perhaps something fitting about watching it this way. The pseudonymous title character is a middle-aged puzzle-setter called John Taylor who, up until the events of the show, has barely ever left his home, which also happens to be the house he grew up in. He uses a brick phone that his sister-in-law bought him twenty years ago and hates the internet. The idea of a streaming service would be enough to make John squirm.

The greatest joy of watching Ludwig weekly with my parents, however, was the fact it is set in Cambridge. Admittedly, as a proud Homertonian, the chances of seeing the window of my college bedroom make a cameo were slim, but getting to judge how a city I know and love is used to tell a story filled with murder and mystery was nonetheless exciting.

The murders take us all over a fictionalised version of Cambridge. We find ourselves down Silver Street, renamed Mallard’s Way and in a Queen’s accommodation block that is now simply a ‘development’. What’s more, the routes John drives around Cambridge make no sense. When driving to work for the first time, John takes the car down Trumpington Street only for the camera to cut to him driving the wrong way down Queen’s Lane and somehow cross the bridge on Silver Street to end up at what looks like east Cambridge. It is a comic bit that John can only just about drive, but to think the writers wanted to convey this via some odd route that could only be noticed by people who knew Cambridge streets very well is a stretch. I doubt it is a little Easter egg for Cambridge citizens; rather, I think it is just an awkward mistake, plot-hole even (does Ludwig have teleportation skills we do not know about?).

“the routes John drives around Cambridge make no sense”

However, Cambridge seems an apt choice for the show. The city suits the quaint, slightly off-the-wall, intellectual humour as well as the Britishly gothic nature of the Agatha-Christian murder mysteries. Yet the location is hardly significant and perhaps misused. The city isn’t as much of a character as I had hoped. St John’s is the only college to make an appearance in the show. The college features in a montage in episode three, which is based entirely around a church that, while beautiful in its own right, is quite obviously not a college chapel, nor an especially recognisable church for that matter. The victim of this episode’s murder is a Cambridge tour guide, whose tour John takes us on in his attempts to solve the murder. Just like the car ride in episode one, the route that the tour follows is not especially intuitive and the final location is the aforementioned unnamed church — perhaps a little anticlimactic if you are a visitor to Cambridge.

David Mitchell, the comedian who stars in the show, is an alumnus of Peterhouse. He probably wasn’t driving the car in any of the shots of John bumbling his way to work as I like to think Mitchell might have known logical vehicle routes in his old stomping ground. But then, maybe everyone on the set who knew Cambridge was a reclusive Girtonian who hardly set foot in the city centre.

Now, for what it’s worth, I really enjoyed Ludwig. Loved it, even. The weekly episodes continued into term, so I watched the rest of it with my boyfriend, who comes from a family of David Mitchell sceptics. When out for lunch with them a few weekends ago, we expressed our excitement at having watched the show, describing the clever puzzle-solving, witty humour and the gripping plot at the centre of it all. By this point, my parents were several episodes behind and rather cross I had caved and begun watching the series on iPlayer. It just wasn’t very Ludwig of me.