The Soundtrack Of Our Lives:Mix Tape.

"You can take the road that takes you to the stars now. I'll take the road that sees me through" - Road, Nick Drake

"I'm going down to the place tonight to see if I can get a taste tonight. A taste of something warm and sweet that shivers your bones and rises to your heat" - Some Candy Talking, The Jesus And Mary Chain

I should have liked it so much more than I actually did. It's full of the music I grew up with (The Fall, The Stone Rose, The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, New Order, The Velvet Underground), it's set around the sort of house parties and pubs I used to go to, and it's a romantic, story of star-crossed young lovers and I'm nothing if not a romantic at heart.

Yet for some reason Mix Tape (BBC2/iPlayer, directed by Lucy Gaffy, and based on a story by Jane Sanderson) didn't hit with quite the same emotional force of other dramas in the same mould. I'm thinking One Day, Normal People, Us. or Mayflies. I sometimes had the feeling I'd seen it before. Sticking with the theme of music, it felt like a cover version. Maybe even a tribute act.

Mix Tape is, ultimately, a very sweet tale and it captures the awkwardness of young love terrifically well in places (except perhaps an instance of couple dancing at a house party, not on my watch), and in some places it is excellent and enjoyable. But it's all a bit uneven. There's a real sense of people acting. Characters are either very good or very bad. There are few of the grey areas that you get in real, complicated, life. In places it feels like a simulacrum of reality rather than reality itself.

Which, as a television show, it is. It's not entirely unbelievable but it's not entirely believable either. We begin in Sheffield, 1989 (cue a television showing Margaret Thatcher, of course) when Daniel (Rory Walton-Smith) and Alison (Florence Hunt) meet as young students. He makes her a mixtape (the first of many, tracks by Primal Scream, Cabaret Voltaire, Bowie, Joy Division, and Edith Piaf - nice touch) and carriers her bag for her. She's into The Shop Assistants and Fuzzbox (preternaturally cool?) and they have their first kiss to The Mary Chain's Some Candy Talking.

Whilst Daniel's dad, pigeon fancier Bill (Mark O'Halloran), is supportive of his son's relationship, mother Marian (Helen Behan) is more circumspect. How come Alison always comes round to their place and yet Daniel has never been to her house or even been allowed to walk her home? Because, unknown to Daniel, Alison's home is not a happy one. Mother Catherine (Siobhan O'Kelly) drinks, creates a scene in the chippy, and has an absolutely awful on/off boyfriend in the egregious Martin Baxter (Jonathan Harden).

Two decades later, Daniel (now played by Jim Sturgess) is still in Sheffield. A music journalist who has worked for the NME and possibly Rolling Stone and appears to be inspired by Alexis Petridis (though also reminds me, looks wise, of Johnny Marr). Alison (Teresa Palmer) is a hugely successful novelist living in Sydney. Both are married with kids. 

Daniel's wife Katja (Sara Soulie has either been lumbered with a somewhat two dimensional character or else fails to bring it to life, the jury's out) wants to go on a road trip now they're empty nesters but Daniel wants to write a book about some obscure, and presumably made up, long lost musician. This, inevitably, causes tension in their relationship.

Alison, meanwhile, is married to the condescending and controlling surgeon Michael (Ben Lawson) and daughter Stella (Julie Savage), one of two, still lives at home with them. When we first meet her she seems to be a typically rebellious teenager but we soon find out she's pregnant and won't say who the father is. Alison and Michael disagree on what course of action Stella should take. This, inevitably, causes tension in their relationship.

At times, Mix Tape is more like a portrait of two middle aged marital breakdowns than it is a story of young love and that's not to its detriment either. They are both suffering what Daniel's friend Duncan (Alexis Rodney) accurately calls "the very definition of a midlife crisis" but is that because they both married the wrong person all those years ago?

It's 2009 so Daniel uses Facebook to stalk, sorry - get in touch with, Alison but what's he hoping to achieve by doing that? You don't need to be Nostradamus to see where this is all going. Yet when Daniel and Alison finally meet up they appear to be at slightly crossed purposes. Luckily their cookie cutter spouses, sent direct from central casting, contrive to change that and soon they're either tying up their many loose ends or tangling them up further.

To Mix Tape's credit it's not until very near the end you're sure exactly how it will all pan out. There's a couple of other supplementary story lines (Alison's brother Peter (Conor Sanchez) is mercilessly bullied for being gay, there are some big themes (rape, suicide), there are lots of phones and texting, there's more than a few pints downed, and there's a fantastic soundtrack - of course. Arctic Monkeys, Richard Hawley, even Frente! and The Comsat Angels. The Cure's Lovesong and New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle work particularly well although it feels like some of the Australian music on offer is part of some contractual obligation. As Mental As Anything's Live It Up was definitely not an indie disco staple of the late 80s/early 90s and I'd never even heard of the band 1927 before and I bought the NME, Melody Maker. and Sounds every week for way longer than I should have done.

Yet in some places it felt the music, and the act of being a music lover, was fetishised. When a needle drops on to a vinyl record in a room full of posters (even The Jack Rubies appear at one point) I was reminded of the kind of middle aged guy who bores on about 'real music' and gets angry when youngsters use the word 'vinyls'. And those people are almost always pricks which is something that, in Mix Tape, Daniel never is.

He's almost too good to be true - although maybe that's me remembering some of my own terrible behaviour at that age. But Mix Tape does too often go for the low hanging fruit. Sheffield is council estates, chip shops, homing pigeons, Full Montyesque views across its rolling hills, and The Leadmill and Sydney is Bondi Beach, Sydney Harbour Bridge, chic cafes, and green fields and Alison's friend Sheila (Jacqueline McKenzie) is more a trope than a fully realised character. A wise old lesbian who spends her days in an old colonial house on the outskirts of Sydney, drinking wine, and dishing out sweary homespun wisdom.

Mix Tape, enjoyable though it was, leans too heavily on tropes like this for viewers (or this viewer at least) to get fully immersed, to really care about what happens to Daniel and Alison. It's always interesting to think about, and to make art - or content - about, the lives we could have had but didn't compared to the lives we actually do have. Of course, our imaginary parallel lives are always remarkably unblemished and nothing really bad ever happens in them. In reality, we know it's quite different. I'm not sure Mix Tape did quite a good enough job in conveying this. But, hey, I sang along to Hit The North. Who wouldn't?