What a cracker of a team

ITV series The Bletchley Circle has been revived for a spin-off that sees the former code-breakers tracking a serial killer in San Francisco

Four years after their show was cancelled by ITV, The Bletchley Circle girls are back, cracking crimes through their knowledge of codes. In a new series, two of the original cast members – Julie Graham and Rachael Stirling – move to the US and join two American sleuths to solve complex cases.

The show is a follow-on from the original, which was set in the early 1950s and focused on a group of former Bletchley Park code-breakers who started investigating crime once their work during the Second World War was done. Alongside Julie and Rachael, it starred Anna Maxwell Martin, Sophie Rundle and Hattie Morahan. It was dropped in 2014 after two series but thanks to its success overseas has been revived by a US video streaming service, and four new two-part stories, split into two series, will be shown on ITV.

‘It was sad when the series ended, so it was great to bring it back,’ says Julie, who returns as Jean McBrian. ‘I always felt it had legs to run but we don’t make the decisions; actors have no power. I only realised how popular it was in America and Canada when we started working on this new series in Vancouver. Most of the cast and crew from over there had been huge fans of the original. They seemed to have taken these women to heart.’

Her character Jean is an unlikely detective. This new series begins in 1956 when, after all that important war work, she is feeling unfulfilled in her job as a librarian. One day her Bletchley friend Millie Harcourt, the aristocratic adventuress played by Rachael, spots an item in a newspaper about a serial killer in San Francisco who leaves the same hall- mark as the murderer of one of their friends. Both have reason to feel guilty about the girl’s death – as they had fallen out with her the day she died.

Millie remembers that US servicemen were in the area when the girl died and wants to go to San Francisco and investigate. At first Jean dismisses the plan. But then she is turned down for a new job at the Foreign Office, where a young man rejects her for being too old, too inexperienced and knowing nothing outside of the library. Having signed the Official Secrets Act, she can’t tell him what she really did during the war. ‘That scene encapsulated everything about the frustration the real women had after being so useful,’ says Julie, 52. ‘The opportunities they missed out on were tenfold.’

Jean agrees to go to San Francisco

and there the pair track down two of their American counterparts, Iris (Crystal Balint) and Hailey (Chanelle Peloso), who used to work at the Signal Intelligence Service. The US women are at first unsure about helping. But the Brits convince them and together they use their code-breaking skills to spot a pattern in the way the killer tracks his prey.

Julie Graham is delighted that the

SET THE SCENE

The show is filmed in Vancouver but set in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. A mainly Japanese area before WWII, many residents were sent to internment camps and African Americans moved in. show highlights the post-war plight of Bletchley’s girls. ‘ We spoke to some women who’d been at Bletchley and they were just like Jean: fascinating but totally unshowy. They were not given any glory; imagine what they could have achieved. What an astonishing waste.’ The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco starts on Wednesday at 9pm on ITV.