BBC《#谜探路德维希#》第二季
《Radio Times》2026.08.15-08.21

「主演David Mitchell的第二季片场日记」
I'm David Mitchell and this is my Ludwig season 2 on-set diary

▶1 September 2025
Ludwig is starting to film again, more than a year after we shot the first series. I feel daunted. I love making this show (I always dreamed of playing a character who potters around thoughtfully in a mac, realising things) but, in another way, it’s like going back to school. I’m now going to be doing this thing every weekday until Christmas.

Making a single episode of a drama can take two or three weeks. The last thing I filmed was Would I Lie to You, which takes two or three hours. (Although this doesn’t seem like a short time to guests who are new to panel shows. I remember when Ronnie Corbett was on my team in 2010. He was used to the timing of the 1970s; he assumed it would take about 40 minutes. As we entered the third hour, the chuckles of this 79-year-old comedy hero became less jovial by the second).

The first week of Ludwig series two involves a lot of car scenes. In the first series, my character (John Taylor, a puzzle-setter whose twin brother is a policeman who goes missing) was depicted humorously as a bad driver. I can’t actually drive at all. In the new series, John discovers that his driving licence isn’t valid and he has to be driven everywhere, which makes life easier.

I spend the morning in the passenger seat with Anna Maxwell Martin (who plays John’s sister-in-law Lucy) pretending to drive, but we are actually on a low loader – a sort of low-based towing truck that moves the car along. Sounds very efficient. But every time I’ve ever been on one of these, it’s like the crew is trying it out for the first time in history.

In the last scene of the day, I’m in the car with Ralph Ineson who plays the intimidating Chief Constable Ziegler. He’s a lovely man but he has the deepest and most terrifying voice of anyone in the business, which is probably why he usually plays villains. I can’t tell you what happens in the scene as it gives away too much about the series. Not really.

He asks me some questions about where my twin brother is, the car stops at a temporary light and I take the opportunity to do a runner.

Ralph Ineson is driving, obviously, which makes it easier. I wouldn’t have fancied leaping out from behind the wheel.

▶5th September
Tonight, Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping, the first sketch show that Robert Webb and I have done on TV since 2010, starts going out on Channel 4. But it would be very old-fashioned of me to think of this as its launch night – obviously a sketch has already gone out on the internet. It’s “The Airport Security Sketch”, a depiction of the terror that airport security people induce in passengers about whether or not they’re supposed to have removed their shoes, belts and watches, and whether or not they should put their laptops separately in a tray. I play a nervous passenger. For the filming,

I wore a wig to differentiate it from my normal self, and when my baby daughter came on set she was massively freaked out and wouldn’t look me in the face.

It seems to have gone down well online. At least, people who are experts in computer things have made pleased noises, in a way that makes me think it doesn’t really mean anything. I go along with it because it feels Luddite not to but I wish television was like it used to be.

Having said that, I don’t watch the first episode on TV because I’m having dinner in Cambridge with my friend Paul. Ludwig is set in Cambridge, so the production has de-camped here and I’ve spent most of today walking around the streets making deductions. Or looking like I am.

It was when I lived in Cambridge, as a student in the 1990s, that I read Maigret and Raymond Chandler and dreamt that one day I, too, might be a pretend detective. It’s a dream come true to be back here actually doing it. But Cambridge is an absolute nightmare to film in. It looks great, but you have to bring in a lot of vehicles full of lights and cameras and actors and make-up artists, and this city wasn’t built for traffic. So they set up a “unit base” on the outskirts of Cambridge, and baffled drivers who don’t know the area try to negotiate their way through with the aid of Google Maps until they reach some bollards and a Cyclists Only sign and I say, “I can get out, I think I know the way from here.”

Paul was my college roommate, and is now living here because he’s the Catholic chaplain of the University. This feels very eminent and grown-up. Last year, he invited me to give the address at the Catholic Chaplaincy annual dinner.

I said yes because it was Paul asking, but I felt a bit of an imposter. For example: I don’t know what you’d assume about the person who gives the address at the Cambridge Catholic Chaplaincy annual dinner but you might, for example, expect that person to be Catholic.

The previous year the address was given by His Beatitude the Cardinal Patriarch of the Chaldeans. Now, I don’t like to jump to conclusions about people from their names or job titles but he did sound like he might be a Catholic.

▶25 November 2025
Yesterday was Stephen Merchant’s birthday! But he doesn’t mention that. He’s here on the set of Ludwig, guest-starring as a retired snooker player from the glory days who gets unexpectedly tangled up in a murder. Well, not that unexpectedly. I imagine the viewers will be expecting it when they tune in.

Today, even though Stephen is quite a good friend, I google him for the first time to check if he’s older than me. He isn’t. He’s four months younger. He turned the same age I am yesterday. I phone my wife, and she says we have to get him a cake. She takes these things very seriously. She still draws balloons on the kitchen calendar when anybody she knows has a birthday coming up. I know she’ll be quite angry if I let Stephen Merchant work in “his birth week” and the occasion goes unmarked.

Somebody goes out to get a cake. It’s one of those big creamy chocolate affairs that are nice on the first bite and a bit arduous by the fifth. Stephen Merchant is very nice about it, but doesn’t seem to think it would have been a problem if he hadn’t had a cake. He says he thinks it would be odd, if you’re just working on something for a few days, to make a big deal about your birthday being one of them.

▶3 December 2025
We are filming in Hampstead, north west London. We’re on a lovely winding street where Peter Cook used to live. It turns out that some of the younger cast members have never heard of Peter Cook. This is depressing, but not as depressing as the number of Instagram Influencers with million-strong followings that I’ve never heard of.

The production company have set up a base in what used to be the Pentameters Theatre above a pub on Heath Street. Getting changed into one of John Taylor’s pottering outfits, I remember that I once saw a friend of mine perform in this room – in a production of King Lear, which had made so few concessions to the small-scale nature of the place that its cast was bigger than its audience. In theatrical tradition, actors don’t have to perform if they outnumber the audience but, in this case, it was pretty much a full house. The problem was that the actors outnumbered the seats.

Sadly, it’s not the Pentameters Theatre any more. It has been taken over by the Circle & Star Theatre, run by the comedian Steve Furst.

He tells me that when they took over the theatre they had to remove “more than one cat skeleton” from the premises.That actually sounds more chilling than any of the episodes we’ve recorded. Nevertheless, we’ve done our best. There are two more weeks of filming, then production winds down in time for Christmas and it’s time for us all to wait eight months to see if anybody likes it.