TV Review: THE BLETCHLEY CIRCLE: SAN FRANCISCO + WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

This article was originally published in The Courier on 28th July 2018.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

THE BLETCHLEY CIRCLE: SAN FRANCISCO: Wednesday, STV

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?: Wednesday, BBC One

 A drama loosely based on the British women who worked as codebreakers during WWII, The Bletchley Circle was a sizeable hit when it aired between 2012 and 2014.

Its spin-off, THE BLETCHLEY CIRCLE: SAN FRANCISCO initially appeared to be a slick pulp hokum mystery that abandons the more or less historically factual remit of its predecessor. There is, however, ever so slightly more to it than that.

  

Former Bletchley Park experts Jean (Julie Graham) and Millie (Rachael Stirling) provide a link to the original series, as they travel to San Francisco in 1956 to investigate the unsolved murder of one of their colleagues fourteen years earlier.

A dedicated English codebreaker suspicious of US motives, she was brutally slain by a visiting GI. That established the unsubtle tone. It’s a lurid metaphor for the strained “special relationship” between Britain and America!

Episode one had similarly blunt fun with the period setting. It plunged into a hip underground jazz club where the resident African-American pianist was once a brilliant US Army cryptologist.

She’s also, like her British counterparts, chained to a life of paranoid secrecy.

Despite its pulpy trappings, this series contains nuggets of solemn factual interest. The Bletchley women were told that they’d have to resign if they ever married. They may have helped to win the war, but they couldn’t be trusted to contain official secrets while indulging in idle pillow talk.

It’s essentially the story of backroom heroes who played an invaluable world-saving role, before being abandoned by their governments. It has something to say about war veterans, tinderbox race relations in Eisenhower’s America, and the plight of the poor versus Brave New World property developers. It’s also the story of some fictional spies on the trail of a fictional serial killer.

These seemingly incompatible elements cohabit quite effectively. It’s hardly profound, but it hits its targets.

You could argue that reconfiguring the genuine achievements and sacrifices of the Bletchley women for the purposes of a made-up potboiler crudely undermines their legacy. I’d argue – and this, bear in mind, is an argument I’m having with myself in my head – that it doesn’t. Not really.

Even while placing them in a fictional context, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco still treats them with respect. It’s a well-made piece of entertainment rooted in sincere admiration and compassion.

In the latest episode of WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?, Boy George uncovered a tragic litany of abuse, prejudice and injustice as he traced his Irish roots.

At the age of six, his maternal grandmother was essentially kidnapped by the cruelly overzealous N.S.P.C.C. for the crime of looking abandoned. She was basically sitting on her family doorstep at the time. The more he delved, the more complex it became.

Who knew that a Boy George documentary could provide a fairly nuanced guide to the birth of the IRA?

This long-running series has become ripe for parody, sometimes for good reason. Occasionally, however, it delivers episodes that function as revealing socio-political documents fuelled by anger and despair, like elongated One Show segments hijacked by genuine feeling.

George, an intelligent, sensitive man, didn’t shed contractual tears during his ‘journey’. Good. He was subtly yet evidently moved, there was no need for grandstanding.

All programmes of this nature are contrived and manipulative, but that doesn’t matter when they’re driven by dissonant chords of truth and sincerity.

Mind you, the opening titles – during which even the likes of Lee Mack attempt to look serious and meaningful – are hilarious. Sorry.