I’m not a big fan of ‘cop shows’ or police procedurals. The Australian shows tend to be overly-blokey, as if they’re all still working from the ‘Division 4’ blueprint. American crime shows are often overly-stylized with impossibly beautiful people (‘CSI’) or they’ve been around for so long and become so stale that you can’t help but poke fun at the abundance of spin-offs they’ve spawned (‘CSI’, ‘Law & Order’). British crime shows go the other way, more often than not based around a crotchety old white guy who hates the world but is intent on doing his job for Queen and Country (‘Taggart’, ‘A Touch of Frost’, ‘Inspector Morse’ …  the list goes on and on).

If you’re like me and sick of these same-same crime shows overpopulated with prickly male officers, then allow me to offer you a worthwhile alternative in ‘The Bletchley Circle’, a British three-part show which just finished airing on ITV.

 

‘The Bletchley Circle’ begins in 1943, at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking HQ. We meet a young woman named Susan (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) who is on the brink of decrypting an important German code that will decipher artillery movement. Susan’s colleagues include confident Millie (Rachael Stirling) and quiet girl Lucy (Sophie Rundle) who also happens to have a valuable photographic memory. Overseeing these women’s work is formidable Jean (Julie Graham). Having top office acknowledge that her sixth-sense about an encrypted message was accurate and will be put to use on the frontlines, Susan goes to bed amazed that she, an ordinary woman, has quite possibly informed the movements of an entire battalion of soldiers. Millie quips that Susan couldn’t be ordinary if she tried, and Susan wonders what life will be like for them after the war.

Skip ahead nine years later and Susan is a mother of two, and wife to Timothy, who works a dull (but impressive, to him at least) job at the Department of Transportation. Timothy served in the war and has a bad leg thanks to a near-miss. As with all of the Bletchley women code-breakers, Susan has never spoken of her time at the Park – her husband believes she did clerical work during the war effort, nothing more. The fact that she’s a deft hand at the morning crossword puzzle is the most thought Timothy has given to his wife’s extraordinary brain . Until, that is, a news story captures Susan’s attention.


 

A fourth brutally murdered woman has just been discovered, following on from three previous murders of young, travelling, single women that have Londoners on edge. But with this fourth discovered body, the pattern is all wrong and something does not sit right with Susan. Because she has been following the story over the wireless, and mapping the patterns – following the killer’s routine and habits. So convinced is she that Susan rings in her husband’s old wartime connection to the police commissioner, and she tries to explain her discovered pattern to him, with little success.

So Susan is forced to connect with her old Park friends – Millie, Lucy and Jean. She needs their help to figure out the patterns, and capture the killer.

This show is brilliant. On the one hand, it’s wonderful to see a show that pays tribute to the Bletchley Park female code-breakers. The Park was the hub of Allied cryptography during WWII, and many of the code-breakers secretly working there were women; in fact, 80% of them. The Park was where Germany’s infamous ‘Enigma’ code was broken, with the help of the female-operated ‘Bombe’ electromechanical device.


 

The Bletchley code-breakers are an incredible slice of history, and it’s not really until very recently that their wartime stories were even heard. They had to keep their silence for thirty years for one thing, because of secrecy laws that remained in place until 1975 – after which a slew of autobiographies were released (to little fanfare) detailing the women’s work. In fact, it was only last year that the Queen unveiled a memorial to them at the Bletchley Park museum.

There’s one scene in ‘The Bletchley Circle’ when Susan’s husband, Timothy, appears dressed in his old service uniform, having prepared to pay tribute to the soldier who saved his life – but he’s annoyed at the fact that Susan is running late (to catch a killer, admittedly) and he couldn’t attend the service. One wonders how those Bletchley women felt, seeing all the ceremonies and parades the men received and the continuing memorials – a chance to come together with old comrades. And the women had nothing so grand and public to remember and reminisce about what they did during the war. The secrets they had to keep.

Another strength of the ITV show, is that it examines the very different, and somewhat unsatisfactory, lives that these four Bletchley women built for themselves after the excitement and purposefulness they experienced during the war. Susan became a wife and mother, and it’s during scenes when she’s in the kitchen or at the dinner table that viewers can see how tightly-coiled she is. This is a woman with a brilliant, mathematical and analytical mind who spends her days preparing a roast and listening to her husband talk about his possible promotion at the Department of Transportation. Not bad unto itself, but she wants more, craves it even. At one point Timothy, infuriatingly, promises to bring a new book of puzzles home for Susan to chew through – as if that will satisfy her. It’s not that she doesn’t love her life and family, it’s that she can’t show them who she really is, or once was.

Then there’s Millie, who had a great adventure after the war travelling all over the world. Millie harbours a small resentment towards Susan, who promised she’d go travelling with her but chose her husband instead. Not even a postcard picture imploring Susan to “Never be ordinary!” could persuade her to join Millie in Africa and beyond. Nine years later and Millie is a fiery independent single woman working as a waitress, but clearly longing for more adventures.

Jean became a librarian, and while she resents Susan’s implication that they’re all missing the feeling of being useful and important, it doesn’t take long before Jean is looking around at her life and seeing the gaps that Bletchley Park left in her. Jean does a brilliant job of rallying past female War volunteers to their investigation, proving that she’s just as resourceful as she was when overseeing the Park code-breakers work.

And then there’s Lucy, who has had the worst lot since leaving Bletchley Park – married to a mean and violent husband. A shy and beautiful young woman, she is plagued with a photographic memory that becomes dastardly handy and burdensome during their murder investigation. She remembers everything.

The four-strong female cast of ‘The Bletchley Circle’ is what really makes this show – and though the murder investigation is heart-palpitating and cunning, it’s the renewed friendship of the women that’s really touching and incredible.

‘The Bletchley Circle’s is one of the smartest whodunits I've seen in a long time – it’s more Agatha Christie than Inspector Morse (and Thank God for that!) With a nod to the fascinating history of the Bletchley Park code-breakers, and examining the lives of women after the war effort, this is not your typical crime show and should not be missed.