A large prefab hut. A hundred primates mill around. A hundred typewriters stand on a hundred desks. A producer enters.
PRODUCER: Monkeys! Assemble! Your assignment today is to deliver eight scripts for the first series of The Bletchley Circle spin-off, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco. What’s that, Bonzo? Why is there a spin off of an ITV series no one’s ever heard of four years after the original finished? Because that’s the way God and a critical mass of agents wants it, I guess. And kudos on the sign language, there. You’re really coming on.
OK, guys, here’s the brief: it’s about four disaffected women, codebreaking comrades during the war whose talents are now being stifled in 1956 by domesticity specifically and the patriarchy generally, who come together to solve implausible murders via painfully obvious clues and in excruciatingly minute degrees.
Rachael Stirling is still playing Millie and delivering every line like Lear being pushed through a sieve and Julie Graham is back as group matriarch Jean McBrian. They go to San Francisco to investigate the wartime murder of their colleague Claire who had her tongue cut out, a symbol drawn on her palm and her cardigan ruined.
The new girls are Hailey, a halfwit who is good with machinery, and Iris, a genius whose husband still doesn’t know she basically won the war singlehanded and keeps asking why they’re having leftovers for dinner again. I know it’s not much to go on. Bonzo, I don’t know who taught you the signs for “Dan Brown himself would pale”, but I wish they hadn’t.
All of you, to your stations! We shoot at midnight! Coco – I don’t wanna hear it. Type!
Thus, I imagine, was the genesis of The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV). The monkeys gamely added flesh to the bones by adding a subplot about the Fillmore, a predominantly black area of San Francisco that has become the latest focus for money-grabbing proselytisers for “urban renewal”. Iris and her African American family are under threat of losing their home to this enforced (white) gentrification and their son is on the frontline of the fight. Or, as they put it: “Seems our son is becoming a regular Martin Luther King!”
In the middle of what we must surely now be able to call without fear of contradiction the golden age of television, raising character and narrative development on screen to the state of high art, there is a certain thrill and sneaking admiration for a channel that sees paper dolls exchanging deathless dialogue and runs towards it all, arms outstretched.
“The major sixth is a chord hard to improvise on,” jazzsplains a musician at the Fillmore bar, to which Millie and Jean’s first clue – a goodbye message from a Yank codehound that Jean has luckily kept since the war ended 14 years ago – has led them. “One wrong note and the whole thing dissolves in a syrupy mess.” Said no one, out loud, ever.
“Can I get you anything, ma’am?” says Millie, in 1942, when Jean is still her boss and has had to discipline another girl for being a total div. “A heart,” Jean replies staring into the middle distance. “It seems mine’s made of coal.” (“Terrific work, Bonzo!” shouts the producer. “Period-specific metaphor! Bonus Fyffes for you tonight!”)
By the time Jean is looking with bafflement at a thin length of potato – “They call it a fry, apparently” – and Millie is intuiting that the killer is killing people “to keep them quiet” and Hailey chugs back a scalding-hot cup of tea because the fact that it is an English thing apparently negates for her the fact that it is still a quarter pint of boiling liquid, you may be demanding an extra banana yourself for sitting through it.
Together the quartet realise that the seemingly random numbers in the killer’s messages are code (– “They can’t be times.” “Why not?” “Because one of them’s ‘75’” – and their four fizzing brains work out that they reveal where he is going to find his next victim and then where he is going to dump the body. Jean scams the man in charge of a wartime database for more info, Hailey tells her “You got moxie!”, and OH GOD, THERE’S NO DENOUEMENT – IT’S GOING TO TAKE US ALL SERIES TO FIND THIS GUY.
In short, it’s absolutely terrible and a welcome port in the storm of quality out there. Pour yourself some scalding-hot tea, sit back and enjoy.
