Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show The Bletchley Circle

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Great Britain fair loves a war story. It is the stuff of which our legends are made. When you Yankees misappropriated how the Enigma machine was solved by Americans for a film (U-571), rather than the brave and bright at Bletchley Park we howled.

Bletchley Park.

It holds a particular place in our hearts. It housed a demon associated with the whole damn war effort that was not until recently resolved. Alan Turing. He was chemically castrated by the state because he was gay, but was the man who solved Enigma, saved countless lives and hastened the end of the war. Our thanks and gratitude were a disgrace but that is all behind us now…
We have made amends and he is on one of our bank notes.

We still have a fascination for that secret place in the English countryside, Bletchley Park, where the brightest and most intelligent were gathered as part of the war effort to beat the Nazis and bring victory to the allies. The role of the assembled intelligentsia was to try and break the various codes being used by the enemy which drove their war effort.

And so we begin, here, with the premise that anyone who was in Bletchley was a bit of a bright spark.

Quite a few were women: and like Turing not often given the credit they deserved. Many times, consigned to making the tea or typing it was not a time of gender enlightenment and equality. And yet it was these women to whom the makers of the Bletchley Circle turned for their drama. Over only 2 seasons and 7 episodes a stellar cast were assembled to solve the mysteries which came across their pathways and added yet another level to the Bletchley story.

We got Anna Maxwell Martin as Susan Gray, Rachael Stirling as Camilla ‘Millie’ Harcourt, Sophie Rundle as Lucy, Julie Graham as Jean McBrian and Hattie Morahan as Alice Merren – not seen until series 2. An ITV produced show running from 2012 to 2014, though set in the 1950s this was pitting the wits of a team of codebreakers against the criminal classes those pesky men could not solve.

We began in 1952, 7 years after the end of hostilities. Susan, Millie, Lucy and Jean, formerly of an exciting wartime secret project, are now in their ordinary and mundane lives. Susan begins to hear of a series of murders in London, noting a pattern – just like she used to do back in the day during that exciting time in their lives. Bringing first Millie, then Jean and finally Lucy on board, they press on to solve the crimes. Of course, two of their number, Susan and Lucy, are married but keep their activities from their husbands by pretending to be going to a book club – some things, even though the war has ended, you cannot help yourself doing, like keeping secrets!

Of course the police won’t touch their methods until they prove to be successful and the combination of female outsiders outwitting the insiders was part of its success. Millie’s house becomes their headquarters as the older Jean corals them into action, Susan drives the narrative as she is the one who seems to find all the things worthy of investigation. To add some color, we have Lucy married to a man who beats her – not quite and not even domestic bliss. Lucy also has a very special skill in memory, whilst Alice, on trial for the murder of her lover at the beginning of series two joins to add some of that jeopardy.

As I said, we love a war story and over the two series only three mysteries were solved, making it a bit of a slow burn. That was perhaps its downfall as it did not have the pace of other dramas around them of the time. It did however have some cracking television actresses which meant scheduling around their other commitments would also have been difficult. The first series solved a serial killer whilst the second began by springing Alice out from under possible capital punishment but by the final few episodes I was getting right into this, only to discover that this was quite literally it!

And then they took a twist and made The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco. But that, as they say is another story…

In the meantime, this ITV series was aired on PBS and I would imagine it may have made its way onto other platforms…

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television, you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until, in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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