Full circle

After just one episode, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (ITV, Wednesday) seems certain to stand out from the crowd. In an age when most television dramas range from the perfectly fine to the extremely good, it already looks like a proper old-fashioned stinker.

Admittedly, one of its more obvious problems is bang up-to-date: by adhering so spinelessly to the mantra of ‘women and black people good, white men bad’, the programme not only creates an overwhelmingly dreary sense of déjà vu, it also deprives itself of any possibility of genuine dramatic tension. But there are plenty of more traditional flaws too, including such classics as wooden dialogue, leaden humour and a plot of impressively po-faced preposterousness.

The original Bletchley Circle series — cancelled a few years ago to no great public mourning — featured four women who had worked together in wartime Bletchley Park now solving crimes in 1950s London, where the baddies obligingly provided coded clues as to what they were up to. Now, rather like all those 1970s British films in which the characters in a sitcom went on holiday to Spain, it’s changed its location and… well, not much else.

The first episode began with a flashback to Bletchley Park where a group of women were cracking German codes by means of looking thoughtful while tapping pencils against their mouths. One was then murdered outside an American soldiers’ club by someone who left a strange symbol drawn on her hand. After that, we cut to 1956 when former Bletchleyite Millie (Rachael Stirling) is a bored-looking governess whose teaching methods largely consisted of getting her charges to read American newspapers. Quite why she did this was never made clear, but luckily it did allow for some cunning historical scene-setting.