Breaking the Code: Biography of Alan Turing (Derek Jacobi, BBC, 1996)

[fendweller]

But let me be clear - this is riveting. Tragic, fascinating and extremely well acted. It's made me want to find and read the original. Is it in print? The recent Channel 4 profile is bound to provoke fresh interest.

[fendweller]

Love Derek Jacobi, but the stammer's a massive distraction. No doubt Turing had one. But Jacobi makes you think 'Claudius' every time he does it.

[MsTruNorth]

@fendweller Why do you believe Turing "had to have a stammer"?

[fendweller]

@MsTruNorth Have another look at what I wrote. I merely said that if Jacobi does Turing with a stammer, we must assume Turing had one (it's a gratuitous inaccuracy otherwise). My point was that as Jacobi was already famous for one of the best-known stammers in TV drama (Claudius), it inevitably colours our response to this later performance. Well it coloured mine anyway, at least to start with. But it's a wonderful performance that's made me want to find the original script.

[MsTruNorth]

@fendweller I agree that the stammer--as Jacobi portrayed it--is a massive distraction, as you say. I suspect that if Turing had any stammer at all it was more on the order of what being a stammer of the sort King George had (not the pathetic I Claudius stammer). See the biography of Turing posted at my YT site. It is called "Alan Turning: A Solitary Valor"

[MsTruNorth]

@fendweller If I'd been a member of the Turing family, I'd have sued the production. But that's just me.

[XZohar123]

@MsTruNorth he didn't die THAT long ago. It's pretty well established that Alan Turing had a stammer.

[MsTruNorth]

@XZohar123 King George VI didn't die that long ago either, and although he had a stammer, it was not of the air-sucking melodramatic variety that Jacobi renders every time he does someone who has a stammer. Most people whom I've heard who had a stammer do so in the way King George VI did...The word simply will not come out. The stammer is silence, with the exception of the victim attempting the first syllable, if they dare. Not this air-sucking thing Jacobi does.

[MsTruNorth]

@fendweller I agree. The way Jacobi did a stammer distracts entirely too much from everything else goping on.  Turing's stammer was probably closer to the kind of stammer King George did. King George did not stammer in the manner that Jacobi does.