Pretty Good

People are voting emotionally.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Gripping series- female characters are diverse in personalities and their non judgemental interactions are refreshing to see . I do have a problem with the accents and can only get about 25 % of what is said , as they do have heavy accents . I realize this is a British production, I just wish I cold understand more. I gave this a 9 only because I miss so much of the dialogue.

Interesting concept, but facile execution.Like Foyles War, this can't get its transport history right. A routemaster bus features from both outside and inside at various times - but this program is supposed to be set in 1952 and the Routemaster wasn't introduced in London until 1956. Susan's husband's car is a 1954 Morris Oxford.Sorry if this sounds pedantic, but it does rather destroy any sense of historical context.I'd also like to know where, in the days before the internet, the intrepid ladies managed to get hold, so easily, of so much information on trains, work rosters and the like. It's as though the writer/director think that the only difference between the internet age and the 1950s is that information was only available in hard copy in the 1950s. Information in the 1950s was very much harder to come by, especially as it even predates the photocopier.Continuity is very poor, especially given low level of lighting for many scenes. The viewer has no time to process the end of the previous scene before the next is upon us - often involving the same character arriving in a different location.

The genre of the amateur detective is old and shopworn. In the hands of the masters like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers it can be brilliant, as long as we accept the formal quaint convention that a little old lady or an English lord might go around solving murders that baffle the police. In Bletchley Circle instead of one amateur sleuth we get four: a committee of nerdy women who, having worked at code-breaking in WWII, now have not much to do and nothing to challenge their superior minds. In fact, almost the entire first episode is spent having one of the ladies trying to convince the other three to join the hunt for a vicious serial killer. But even the four together don't add up to one Miss Marple or Peter Whimsey. They're supposed to be super smart and great at putting together clues from reading newspapers and other evidence they collect, but at the same time they're clueless, bumbling and squeamish. One nearly gets herself raped trying to bait the killer and they commit various obvious offenses by contaminating crime scenes and stealing evidence. No wonder the police regard them with suspicion. Though they uncover leads through careful analysis, how they arrive at their conclusions is summarized so quickly and sketchily that the audience has no idea how the pieces were put together. In detective fiction the reader (or viewer) is supposed to have some idea of the steps that lead to the solution of the case. In this we are just told the women are doing some heavy thinking and then come out with a result.Another very annoying feature is the heavy feminist bias that muddies the plot. Not counting the killer, most all the men in this series are either fools or abusers. This is retro feminism from the 1980s superimposed on a postwar story. One girl's husband notices that she's absent from the home at odd hours and improbably accepts her strange behavior without explanation. Another woman's husband beats her up, a digression which adds to the theme that men are beasts and annoyingly delays the unfolding of the plot. Grotesque and creepy details of the killer's M.O. seemed purely gratuitous to me detracting from the excitement of the hunt. The mystery-thriller is an old standby and needs new elements to keep it fresh, but remember that gifted amateurs going around solving crimes is a literary convention that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

For anyone expecting anything to do with Bletchley Park and code cracking you will be disappointed. The plot could be attached to almost any 4 women with time on their hands. They just happened to have worked at Bletchley Park, though you wouldn't know it from the series.We never get to see any real sleuthing and eventually the foursome luck their way into capturing the perpetrator. Indeed, he almost wills them to capture him so that he can "go out with a bang", with some girlies from the park, as a way of closing the circle that began in Bletchley.The acting was fine. Simon Williams under-used. Unlike Williams in Upstairs Downstairs, I won't be watching this series again, years from now.A rather odd way of shoe-horning WW2 and Blethcley Park into a mystery/thriller but that is to be expected as the years pass. Expect Aliens v Tommies in the near future.