CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Mix Tape: A blissful wallow in the nostalgic afterglow of innocent young love

Daily Mail​

21 hours ago

Mix Tape (BBC2)
Funny thing — until the advent of the Pill in the 1960s, most young women married their first serious boyfriend.
That's why, this year, a good many couples will be celebrating diamond or even platinum wedding anniversaries. But a lifetime later, it's almost shocking for teenagers to marry.
Yet the idea of First Love is still hugely romantic... and, thanks to social media, countless people are getting back together with the schooldays crush with whom they shared their first kiss or first dance.
The comedian Katherine Ryan, for instance, dated her husband, Bobby Kootstra, at school in Canada, until he dumped her on prom night. Decades later, they met again and now have two children together, and is pregnant with her third.
Mix Tape wallows blissfully in the nostalgic afterglow of a teenage love affair. Jim Sturgess and Teresa Palmer play former sweethearts Daniel and Alison, who shared a heartbreakingly chaste passion for each other in school at the end of the 1980s but have long since drifted apart.
Both are married, both are parents of teenagers, both are writers — but while he's a struggling music journalist still living in Sheffield, she's a bestselling novelist with a millionaire's penthouse in Sydney, Australia.
A sense of missed opportunities and disappointment pervades their lives, though neither of them wants to acknowledge it.
Daniel's wife is smugly satisfied that her career is so much more successful than his. Alison's husband is arrogant and overbearing, even controlling.
Any bitterness in the story is offset by the flashbacks to schooldays, drenched in the music of the era.
The pair first meet at a party where The Stone Roses are shaking the walls, and in a series of shy, touching scenes, they bond over a shared obsession with the wistful songs of Nick Drake and The Velvet Underground.
He (Rory Walton-Smith) makes her a cassette of his favourite tracks and slips it into her bag. She (Florence Hunt) compiles her own tape and leaves it in his locker.
Many years later, she smiles distantly and tells her daughter, 'You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix tape.'
All nostalgia has a flattering soft-focus filter, of course. In reality, their C90s wouldn't only feature cool bands like The Smiths, The Jesus And Mary Chain and New Order.
There'd be some U2 on there, some Billy Joel, possibly something truly embarrassing like Bananarama. But the whole point of the past is that we can remember it the way it should have been, not how it really was.
This four-part series, based on the acclaimed novel by Jane Sanderson, evokes a Yorkshire that perhaps had already vanished by 1989, where men in back-to-back terraces kept pigeons and supped from Thermos flasks while fishing in the canal.
But we believe in it, because of the guileless innocence of the young actors playing Daniel and Alison. It's all so pure, it must be true.
Meanwhile elsewhere on TV, Dan from Durham, a contestant on The Great British Sewing Bee (BBC1), revealed his talent for fire-breathing.
One burp, presenter Sara Pascoe warned, and an outfit could go up in flames. The show has had drag acts before, but never dragons.