Bletchley Park - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Bletchley featured heavily in Enigma and its 2001 film adaptation; although filming was done at Chicheley Hall.
• The Second World War code-breaking sitcom pilot "Satsuma & Pumpkin" was recorded at Bletchley Park in 2003 and featured the late Bob Monkhouse OBE in his last ever screen role. The BBC declined to produce the show and develop it further before creating effectively the same show on Radio 4 several years later, featuring some of the same cast, entitled Hut 33. Parts of the unseen pilot are to be shown on documentaries about Bob Monkhouse on both ITV & BBC in 2010.
• The BBC Radio 4 sitcom Hut 33 and the play Breaking the Code were also set at Bletchley.
• The ITV television serial Danger UXB featured the character Steven Mount who was a codebreaker at Bletchley, and was driven to a nervous breakdown (and eventual suicide) by the stressful and repetitive nature of the work.
• In the BBC's Torchwood series, the character Toshiko Sato is revealed to have had a grandfather who worked at Bletchley Park up until the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan. Whether he continued working there after Japan declared war on the Allies is unknown.
• A fictionalized version of Bletchley Park is featured in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.
• On 19 June 2007 a 1.5-ton, life-size statue of Alan Turing was unveiled at Bletchley Park. Built from approximately half a million pieces of Welsh slate, it was sculpted by Stephen Kettle, having been commissioned by the late American billionaire Sidney Frank.
• Bletchley came to wider public attention from the 1999 documentary series Station X.
• Bletchley Park plays a significant role in the Connie Willis book "All Clear".
• A mission in the Russian video game Death to Spies: Moment of Truth is called "Bletchley Park". It is set in a partial reconstruction of the actual estate, with certain landmarks and huts carefully reproduced. However, the plot doesn't involve Enigma, which is ironic, since in another mission of the same game the player is tasked with stealing an Enigma machine from a German submarine.
• Bletchley Manor is the destination of the masked ball in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (script of 1996).
• The Bletchley Circle (ITV, 2012) is a murder mystery set in 1952, telling the story of how four former female Bletchley code breakers use their skills to track down a serial killer.