Bletchley Park is the new 3 parter on ITV1. It features four women who, as girls, worked as code breakers in that ultra secret establishment. By the early 1950s the lives of these clever, ingenious women have dwindled exactly as I described in The Fifties Mystique. The dullness of domesticity, the deference to men, in fact all the least enviable aspects of women’s lives in that period, are neatly shown or hinted at. But these particular women re-group and get going – in fact they independently invent a theory of geographical profiling decades before it came into official use, and find the body of a murder victim when male officialdom had failed. The period detail seemed flawlessly researched – except for the usual mistake: if you see a man wearing his hat indoors, you can be sure that nobody who actually remembers the period was involved in the filming.
