Cracking a new country:
Bletchley Circle’s Julie Graham sets out to crack a new code.
Scottish actress Julie Graham makes no secret of her admiration for Bletchley Park’s female code breakers who helped bring an end to World War II.
The women – about 8000 of them – made up 75 per cent of the workforce at the centre but, because they were sworn to secrecy, their contribution wasn’t acknowledged until 1974.
“They could have actually been thrown in jail if they’d divulged what they did to anyone,” says Graham, adding there was no way she could have been as discreet.
“I’m such a blabbermouth. I’d have a couple of drinks in me and I’d be spilling the details to everyone. And also it’s a generational thing, isn’t it?
“Our generation, all that navel gazing we do, social media and sharing our thoughts all the time – I think they would find it absolutely abhorrent and appalling that you would be so boastful and brag about stuff like that.”
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Graham is more than delighted to be starring in Vibe’s The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco, a British-Canadian spin-off of the English mystery-drama The Bletchley Circle, which was axed after two seasons in 2014.
“We were quite disappointed but you know it’s out of your control so you’ve just got to move on and get over it really,” says Graham, who went on to star in Shetland, One Of Us and Benidorm.
The original series, set in 1952-53, starred Graham, Rachael Stirling, Anna Maxwell Martin and Sophie Rundle as four former code breakers who joined forces to solve murders.
Graham and Stirling are reprising their roles as librarian Jean McBrian and the adventurous Millie Harcourt in the reboot in which their characters join forces with two former San Franciscan code breakers to investigate a murder in that city that is eerily similar to one in England a decade earlier.
“I think to go back to something is very difficult, but when you take a project and you move it on to another place it’s very exciting,” Graham says.
“I was very for it because I loved the show and I was very fond of the characters.
“California is a brave new world for Millie and Jean. The old series is set in post-war 50s London which is quite a drab, grey place at the time and suddenly they go to California and it’s all shiny and new so there’s lots of possibilities.
“It’s set in jazz clubs, there’s a racial element to it, there’s a sexual element to it in that they tackle subjects like homophobia and sexism and all that sort of stuff so it feels like a whole new fresh show.”
Like the original, the spin-off was a history lesson for Graham, who admits she knew little about the women of Bletchley Park when she was originally cast to play Jean and even less about the thousands of American women who did the same job on the other side of the Atlantic.
“To be honest, it’s very hard to do research because there’s not a lot written about them. There are very few interviews with these women because they really kept their secrets – many of them took them to the grave with them,” she says.
“We met some women who worked at Bletchley but they come from a different generation where they don’t like to blow their own trumpets. They just stay matter of fact about it and, I think, if there is one thing I took away from talking to them, it was that they were very dignified and very private people.”
She likens The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco to the critically acclaimed movie Hidden Figures, which highlights the work done by African-American women employed by Nasa during the early days of the space race.
“There was a huge number of African-American women who worked at these code-breaking units during the war and that’s even harder to find documentation about.
“I think that is what made The Bletchley Circle so popular and also so interesting, that you saw really smart women like that just had to go back to these lives where they were not valued at all. I think that must have been very, very difficult, to go from doing something so important and then suddenly you’re just thrown on the scrapheap.”
“I’m such a blabbermouth. I’d have a couple of drinks in me and I’d be spilling the details to everyone.” – Julie Graham