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

A biography of the English mathematician Alan Turing, who was one of the inventors of the digital computer and one of the key figures in the breaking of the Enigma code, used by the Germans to send secret orders to their U-boats in World War II. Turing was also a homosexual in Britain at a time when this was illegal, besides being a security risk.
Adapted for Television
Hugh Whitemore wrote a shortened version of the play for television. This was filmed in late 1995, as a production of THE DRAMA HOUSE and WGBH BOSTON for BBC NORTH.The first transmission, to my knowledge, was on 17 September 1996 in Canada, by Showcase Television. It was shown in the United States as a Masterpiece Theater production on 2 February 1997. The first British transmission was on BBC1, 5 February 1997.
Filmed for television in a naturalistic suburban setting, rather than on a timeless, expressionist stage set, Breaking the Code inevitably sacrificed many of the elements that made it grip theatre audiences. No stagecraft magic of Derek Jacobi's real-time changes of age: instead the teenage Turing was played by a young actor.
The adapted script also lost some of the more special moments of the play. For instance, on the stage, Turing reveals the logical secret of the Bombe on his last holiday on Corfu, but with the irony that it is revealed to someone who does not understand a word. On the television screen, his explanation is given to an Intelligence officer 'John Smith', all irony lost.
Hugh Whitemore also dropped the words at the death scene, and supplied an anticlimactic ending, a voiceover explaining the dubious honour done to Alan Turing by having part of the Manchester Ring Road being named after him. But this sudden shift into 1990s documentary mode holds the danger of dating very rapidly, and also prompts the awkward question of what Alan Turing is supposed 'really' to have done, which is even less clear in the television film than it was on the stage.
But the television version gained in ways I could not have foreseen. The direction made it less of a one-man show, and the supporting cast was very strong. The sheer bodily closeness, under the unflinching gaze of the camera, presented a wonderful image of 'the logical' confronting head-on 'the physical,' something I had wrestled with in my own writing.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Alan Turing
• math
• mathematician
• digital computer
• breaking the code
• enigma code
• Hugh Whitemore
• Turing machine
• automata Mathematics BBC

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

[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.

[XZohar123]

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

[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"

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

[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.