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Bletchley Park Code Breakers
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Message 1.Β
Posted by Death and Taxes (U13942286) on Tuesday, 25th October 2011
Excellent program (for once) on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ2 this evening about Tutte and Flowers - two the most important unsung heroes of WW2. Both interesting and informative a rare treat on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ.
Anyone know what the music was in the background? -
Message 2
Posted by Priscilla (U14315550) on Tuesday, 25th October 2011
In truth it was such a good programme that I didn't notice any music.
How sad that such splendid men and their dedicated work was kept secret for so long and unrecognised without honours. Makes the current batches of titles and awards seem all the more crass.
I note that on PoV there has been a good response - and someone has noted somethin about the music.
Regards, P. -
Message 3
Posted by Death and Taxes (U13942286) on Wednesday, 26th October 2011
Actually I thought the music, which I liked, was quite intrusive at times and slightly inappropriate.
Since found out that one of the tunes was Radiohead No Suprises. That was the one bugging me the most.
As to the program there was, for once, a lot of new information at a reasonable level of intelligence. I loved the bit about the chap just sitting down with a sheet of paper and simply drawing out the 'unbreakable' code.
Hopefully the rest of the series will be as good. -
Message 4
Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Thursday, 27th October 2011
I agree that it was very good.
My minor annoyance is that it appeared to repeat the fallacy that the security of a code can be measured by the number of possible choices of the key. That is perhaps true for the purest form of brute-force attack, but it is not a rally a relevant criterion. After all, there are 26! possible choices of key for a simple monoalphabetic substitution cypher, which would not even stop an amateur like me for long.
A more meaningful criterion, AFAIK, is how well the encrypted message hides the underlying order and statistics of both the message and the key. I.e. neither the message nor the key are random (except in the case of one-time pad, where the key is random) but the encrypted message must look random. -
Message 5
Posted by JDCaspian (U15018217) on Thursday, 27th October 2011
I too was glad that there wasn't the usual pandering, commonly found in Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ documentaries these days.
Though as far as the music being out of place, I found it second to the use of "one point six thousand billion", where the million was the American thousand million and not the British million million.
One could argue that globalisation has put us at the short scale, but I'm sure the men honoured would note the difference. -
Message 6
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Friday, 28th October 2011
Interesting bit on R4 "Last Words" today about Tunny and Gil Hayward
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Message 7
Posted by MB (U177470) on Monday, 31st October 2011
I enjoyed the programme. Alan Turing was a very clever mathematician but I have always felt that his importance has been exaggerated at the expense of people like Tutte and Flowers probably because of his homosexuality.
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Message 8
Posted by marchog_du_aka_Stoggler (U14998493) on Tuesday, 1st November 2011
It was a good programme, wasn't it.
I was away in Bristol for work and was sitting in my hotel room bored and wondering about going to find a good pub when it started. I was very quickly drawn in to it, especially as I've always had an interesting in cryptography.
The only thing that annoyed me (only a little though) was at the beginning - the preamble said something along the lines of "this is so-and-so, who did much to shorten the war, but you probably haven't heard of him"; well they said something like that about Tommy Flowers and I had heard of him. Actually, quite a lot of people have heard of him, so I was a little surprised to hear the programme trying to diminish Flowers' celebrity (if that's the right word). They also said that I probably haven't heard of Lorenz, but again I had and it appears in all the books I've read on Bletchley Park before.
Otherwise, a good programme. Enjoyed the illustrations given by the guy in one of the old huts at Station X. -
Message 9
Posted by MB (U177470) on Tuesday, 1st November 2011
I think if you went out on the streets and asked people who broke the German codes then some would name Turing, I doubt whether many would be able to name anyone else.
Many would now about the Enigma machine but again few would know about any other systems like Lorenz. -
Message 10
Posted by marchog_du_aka_Stoggler (U14998493) on Tuesday, 1st November 2011
I think if you went out on the streets and asked people who broke the German codes then some would name Turing, I doubt whether many would be able to name anyone else.
Many would now about the Enigma machine but again few would know about any other systems like Lorenz.Β
True, but they are hardly unknown either, which was what the programme was implying. -
Message 11
Posted by dmatt47 (U13073434) on Tuesday, 1st November 2011
The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ has done quite a lot on Bletchley Park, the codebreakers and the code-breaking machines and whilst a number of people may know about them not everyone does. It is a problem with history programmes generally and in my view the producers need to not treat the viewers as beginners.
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Message 12
Posted by LongWeekend (U3023428) on Wednesday, 9th November 2011
It was a good programme, wasn't it.
I was away in Bristol for work and was sitting in my hotel room bored and wondering about going to find a good pub when it started. I was very quickly drawn in to it, especially as I've always had an interesting in cryptography.
The only thing that annoyed me (only a little though) was at the beginning - the preamble said something along the lines of "this is so-and-so, who did much to shorten the war, but you probably haven't heard of him"; well they said something like that about Tommy Flowers and I had heard of him. Actually, quite a lot of people have heard of him, so I was a little surprised to hear the programme trying to diminish Flowers' celebrity (if that's the right word). They also said that I probably haven't heard of Lorenz, but again I had and it appears in all the books I've read on Bletchley Park before.
Otherwise, a good programme. Enjoyed the illustrations given by the guy in one of the old huts at Station X.Β
marchog-du
I agree, the insistence on claiming that these individuals are "unknown", common in WWII documentaries these days, is a nuisance, and distorts the true picture. Mind you, it does seem to be the attitude of the Lorenz/Colossus loyalists at BP - last time I was there I got an unsolicited lecture on the subject by whoever was manning the display (I didn't even get his name!).
Tommy Flowers is a well-known name. All the books published in the past decade give him due prominence. He also got a substantial inventor's grant at the time, and a gong. I can understand his frustration in the years when Colossus could not be discussed, at the US taking credit for computing firsts that belonged to BP.
Bill Tutte is still relatively unknown, but ti doesn't seem to have bothered him so much.
I know that a 45-minute programme has to concentrate on only a few main points, but I was surprised that Max Newman, who ran the project, didn't seem to get much of a mention.
But overall, it was pretty good. I did find the narrator voice extremely annoying, though.
Oh, and the intercept operators listening for the Fish WT traffic were ATS, not Wrens. But everyone in TV-Land knows that only debs and Wrens were involved with BP
LW -
Message 13
Posted by MB (U177470) on Saturday, 3rd December 2011
"Oh, and the intercept operators listening for the Fish WT traffic were ATS, not Wrens. But everyone in TV-Land knows that only debs and Wrens were involved with BP"
I just had a quick look at a book on Beaumanor to refresh my memory and that (with its associated sites) was ATS but the various branches of the Y Service seem to have cooperated widely.
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