Rewinding romance? BBC Two's Mix Tape explores the art of loving through music

Finally, carting it around, heart thumping, until you can sneak it into someone else’s locker, bag or hand, hoping you’ve successfully conveyed your warm heart with your cool tastes, and that its positive reception will make all the difference to your entire life, for ever.

Mix Tape, the BBC’s new decade-spanning love story, sees Alison and Daniel reconnect three decades after their teenage romance in Sheffield. The present-day pair communicate with each other from opposite sides of the world through songs of their past, before we’re back in 1989 when they dance, kiss, fall out, make up and inevitably part.

It’s the latest addition to the canon that includes huge hit dramas Normal People and One Day. It’s The Way We Were for the Netflix generation and makes you wonder how many TV commissioners are staring dreamily above laptops, listening to old records and dreaming up projects where they get to channel their more energetic, innocent selves.

What sets Mix Tape apart is that it does what it says on the tin, or the tape, with this era-specific ritual providing the soundtrack, and the choice of tunes telling us how we’re meant to feel about these two. The best-selling UK single of 1989 was Black Box’s Ride on Time, but that was never going to pass muster for these two semi-outsiders.

Thus, on our bopping bingo card we get the Cure’s spiky romance, more proof that every teenager believes they’re the first to discover Psychedelic Furs, and New Order, summing it all up with the lyrics to Bizarre Love Triangle: “It’s a problem I find/Livin’ a life that I can’t leave behind.”

Why were mix tapes so charming? Because they relied on brain and heart, not algorithms; because they made a personal, bespoke gift that expressed fathoms about the creator, and their hopes for the recipient. And they belonged to an era where effort, exposure and personal pitfall were all around.

For two decades, mid-70s to mid-90s, we lived in a pre-social-media sweet spot where young people had just enough freedom and technology to secure themselves a rite-of-passage emotional pile-up. Without mobile phones and messaging, if someone didn’t turn up outside McDonald’s at the appointed hour, it was curtains.

Letters – remember them! – could go astray or, worse, be intercepted by a third party, a maze of fateful roads left untravelled in real life, and now a new generation of screenwriters is reaping the benefits.

But what about the rest of us? For sure, we all enjoy the instant gratification of a text message, a playlist, a personal jukebox on our phones that doesn’t have the giveaway sound of Tommy Vance’s dulcet tones, but does something that requires so little effort have any enduring value?

These days, actor John Cusack could presumably win back the heart of his lost love by “liking” one of her Instagram posts. Instead, he remains beloved by millions for putting himself on the line in 1989’s Say Anything, standing outside her window, ghetto blaster aloft, playing their song, Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes.

I’m clearly getting old, which means I can only turn back to New Order who asked on behalf of the rest of us: “Whenever I get this way, I just don’t know what to say/Why can’t we be ourselves like we were yesterday?”

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Mix Tape begins at 9pm on BBC Two on Tuesday 15th July with episodes available on BBC iPlayer.

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