The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV) | ITV Hub
Orange is the New Black (Netflix)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (BBC2) | iPlayer
My Family and The Galapagos (C4) | All 4
If you can shake off the faint tang of quiet desperation, there’s something almost heroic about ITV’s attempt to revivify the goodness-gracious gals of Bletchley Park, four years after the original series was taken, in all kindness, behind the barn and hit with an axe. The Bletchley Circle went down well, apparently, in America, as do many things Brit-wrapped in Churchilliana or snobbery (or indeed both), hence the decision to move two of the gals, in 1956, to San Francisco. With… mixed results.
On the one hand we get to keep Julie Graham and Rachael Stirling as the doughty Scot Jean McBrian and fiery Millie Harcourt, newly coupled with Crystal Balint and Chanelle Peloso, who play, respectively and rather well, the introspective genius and the down-home cracker who can fix any tractor in Okie. We’re still short of period dramas in which women, alone, get both to bond and to exercise their brains in meaningful fashion, and this is surely to be generally welcomed for eight weeks this long, happy summer.
On several other hands we’ve lost Anna Maxwell Martin to the marvellous Motherland. And we’re still, on this evidence, short of period dramas in which women get to exercise their brains in any credible fashion. I mean, how many unsolved killer-sprees in 1950s San Francisco did, actually, call quite specifically for the skill sets of four disparate women schooled in cryptography? I quite get that they’re all in their own ways marvellous, that they miss the war, miss getting to compete with appalling men on their own terms, and all marks for tenacity in the face of unlikely plots, but, again, just how many? Also, we get weary lines of exposition, as when the American ingenues have to ask: “What kind of criminal leaves patterns?” (Wise-beyond-her-years Millie: “They all do. They just don’t know they’re doing it.” Twirls moustache, strokes white cat.)
Worse, we get whole clunky dialogues of plot-establishment languor – “sounds like some folk ain’t too happy about your proposed development, Mr Mayor, to transform the Fillmore district of San Francisco…” – in a way that makes one wonder whether ITV drama has taken any lessons from the deserved success of the likes of Unforgotten, Broadchurch, Vera, Marcella (I’m joking with the last, obviously). Also, the delightful Stirling has many talents, but smoking is not one of them. At one stage, she stubs out a cigarette in a saucer with such ineptitude one wonders why San Francisco wasn’t razed as successfully by fag butt in 1956 as by earthquake in 1906.
In these sleepy-dog days for terrestrial, the streaming services can only shine, which is in no way to tarnish the quite splendid return of Orange Is the New Black. After last season’s riot, and the deaths – received with, shall we say, uneven success – the lasses have been, essentially, rebooted: the core inmates, Piper, Taystee and Red (sadly, Pennsatucky hasn’t made the cut) find themselves in maximum security. Cue a wholly new set of baddies, and new, yet equally dispiriting, guards (one appalling couple of whom have developed the game of “fantasy inmates” – seven points for an attempted suicide, etc).
It’s a hugely ambitious reboot, given that for every new character introduced, one is paying the price for a friend lost. Even when that friend was a murdering, foul-mouthed, misunderstood piece of trash, they were our murdering, foul-mouthed, misunderstood pieces of trash. I think it works, and works resoundingly; the first 10 minutes of the opener, in which poor Suzanne, off her meds and subject to a gleeful harangue of dream sequences regarding the riot, which can only confuse her about which lie she’s meant to remember to tell, is both a fearless exploration of mental instability and about as good as television has any right to be. Dark, glorious, bizarrely redemptive.
If only the same, or even similar, could be said for Picnic at Hanging Rock. The very things I found to praise a couple of weeks ago – mesmeric photography, billowing colourscapes, dreamy, sun-flared shots – have essentially taken over the whole shebang. Heiress Irma has returned from the wild, yet it emerges – between the crazed camera angles, the buzzing flies, the stopped clocks, the endless slo-mo flashbacks – that she has nothing to say: “When I try to remember, it’s as if ants are swarming in my head.” That’ll be the laudanum, love. Three weeks in, just when you’ve begun to prepare for nothing continuing to happen all episode long, suddenly… nothing happens.
You know something bad has happened yet somehow can’t rouse yourself above crippling lassitude to attempt to care. In this, it’s remarkably like anxiously padding round your home clutching a used lightbulb, wondering queasily how best to dispose of it. Or, in fact, Brexit.
Just room to talk up the wonderful wheeze behind Channel 4’s latest nature adventure, My Family and the Galápagos, in which the marine biologist Monty Halls goes to the Pacific with his children, the adorable Isla (five) and Molly (three) – just because, as he says, “there is no greater explorer than a five-year-old”.
You will marvel anew. It’s not as if these islands don’t have enough deep mystery and delight. However, could Darwin, in five short weeks, have here postulated an all-encompassing theory that has stood the test of time? Viewers of all ages get their eyes opened to these islands, in which one in three species – and 90% of the reptiles – are found nowhere else in the world. In the first city, Puerto Ayora, thanks to the lack of natural predators, all animals treat humans with mild curiosity, no hint of learned fear: walruses kip on park benches; pelicans strut around the fish markets. And then there are the bastard Chinese shark-catchers, and the whole globe’s plastic detritus. It’s all winningly narrated by Zoë Wanamaker, with a catch in her heart; this series takes the nails first proffered by Attenborough and drives them deep.
