Who sank the Bismarck?

Spectator, The, Feb 6, 1999 by Delingpole, James

Even though I'm quite funny and very foul-mouthed, I don't think I'd ever make it on the northern stand-up comedy circuit. One problem is that I'm a skinny, southern pooL The other is that I could never tell decent mother-in-law jokes. The reason for this is that, with the possible exception of my wife, I have the finest mother-in-law one could ever hope to have.

Not only does she still look amazingly good - which augurs rather well for the wife's physical charms in 30 years time; not only does she never nag me (far from it she's always smiling beatifically at me and listening intently to my every utterance as if it were the apogee of Wildean wit); not only does she do an awesome osso bucco; but most impressively of all - and there aren't many sons-in-law who can make this claim - my mother-in-law helped to sink the Bismarck.

She did it 50-odd years ago while working as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park, though I only discovered this very recently because she's so damned modest. What changed her mind was the spate of articles about Channel 4's enthralling history of Bletchley and Enigma, Station X (Channel 4, Thursday). In one of them, someone claimed that it was Hut Six which had deciphered the Bismarck's whereabouts. `Nonsense!' she exclaimed. `It was us. Hut Eight.'

Anyway, she has now (reluctantly) agreed to take us all on a guided tour of Bletchley, which I'm desperately looking forward to now that my appetite has been whetted by the excellent Station X. Of course, I wasn't unaware of the achievements of heroic Alan Turing and his team but, until I saw the series, I had always supposed that the processes of code-breaking and the workings of the Enigma machine were a little too abstruse and technical for mathematically-challenged half-wits like me.

By the end of episode one, though and this speaks volumes for the programme's lucidity - I could have told you in laborious detail precisely how the various flywheels, circuit wires and keys of the Enigma machine operated; and exactly how the Bletchley team went about cracking a code which - with odds of something like a million million million to one against should have been uncrackable. As, indeed, I went on to do ad nauseam to any of my dinner party guests unfortunate enough to have missed the programme.

Some people have been irritated by Station X's portentous narration (`It was the Allies' darkest hour. Unless the Kriegsmarine/Luftwaffe/Wehrmacht codes could be cracked within ten seconds etc., etc.'); others by the soft focus re-enactment footage of tweedy young varsity types pretending to be code-breakers. Personally, I didn't find either a problem because a) I doubt it's really possible to exaggerate Enigma's importance and b) close-ups of keyboards or shots of nostalgic oldsters on lawns saying things like 'Ah, yes. The geese. How little they've changed since '41' can grow a bit dull after a while.

Oh, and lest you think I was being too creepy to my dear mother-in-law earlier on, I ought to add that there was an unflattering bit in the documentary which struck a familiar chord. It was the one describing how hopelessly unworldly were some of the pretty young toffettes who'd been recruited to Bletchley. Shortly after struggling in vain to make her first cup of tea, one gel was overheard saying: `How do you get the leaves to sink beneath the water?' Sorry, Rosemary, but I refuse to believe it wasn't you.

I suppose, really, I should be putting in my tuppenny ha'penny's worth about Sex And The City (Channel 4, Wednesday) but - unless my colleague Edward gets there first -- you'll have to wait till my next column. The one thing I absolutely have to mention before it ends, you see, is the truly extraordinary comedy series The League of Gentlemen (BBC 2, Monday).

It's set in the rural northern town of Royston Vasey, whose denizens include a urine-drinking reptile breeder whose mission is to stamp out masturbation, a hairy transvestite cab driver, a newsagent who thinks he's Don Corleone, a bullying careers' adviser who acts like Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a couple of storekeepers so proud of their Local Shop's localness that, if any outsiders pop in, they brutally murder them. As if this didn't make it weird enough already, most of the principal characters are played by men in drag.

Quite how it ever got commissioned I cannot imagine: the writers and actors (Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith) are virtual unknowns; the characters are mostly unsympathetic; the plot has been slow to unravel; the humour is sick, black, disturbing, recherche and quite unlike anything that has been on television before; and with so much location footage - it must have been very expensive to make. But I'm awfully glad it was. The League of Gentlemen is clever, funny, original and very probably a work of genius. It almost makes me want to take back everything rude I've ever said about the stupidity of the BBC.