Do you enjoy hearing true stories about people’s lives in WW2? Or just fancy listening to a good story? The radio play Bletchley Girls fits the bill.
Inside Bletchley Park, England’s TOP SECRET codebreaking center, Dilly Knox enlists a small team of girls to crack some of the enemy’s toughest codes. Whilst Margaret Rock is a trained statistician, the newest recruit is Mavis Lever, 19 years old and a student of German romantic poetry. A friendship develops between this unlikely pair as pressure mounts on them to decipher intercepts which could change the course of the war. But it’s not all-night shifts and Enigma machines; there are dances, pranks, and even a touch of romance.
There are three episodes of 30 minutes each, followed by Episode 4, a 45 minute interview with Tony Comer, recently retired archivist at GCHQ (the successor UK intelligence agency to Bletchley Park) by Ann Morrison, formerly Executive Editor of Fortune magazine. Episode 5 is an interview with the playwright, Lou Beckett, by Jo Durrant of BBC Radio Gloucester
Bletchley Girls is a Jenny Wren Production, written by Lou Beckett. Bletchley Girls was produced by Helen Jeffrey, sound was by Paul Hamblin and Saoirse Christopherson of Boom Sound, and Jim Barnes composed the original music.
Mavis Lever is played by Moya Matthews, Dilly Knox by John Martin Stevens, Alastair Denniston by Philip Douch, Margaret Rock by Rosie Mason, and Keith Batey by Kieran Capaldi.