AV News 180 - May 2010
Secrets of ‘And Never Cackled’
R ic h a rd B ro w n FRPS
This sequence took first place at Midphot (Page 6) and was awarded a PAGB
Ribbon in the IAC Geoffrey Round International. (Page 25) Eds
People often ask me where I get ideas for sequences. In the case of the
Enigma AV, the answer is pretty simple - my good friend Clive Atkins.
Clive and his wife had been on a trip to Bletchley Park and he was full of
enthusiasm to make a video on the Enigma story. Since we had collaborated
on two previous video/AV productions ‘The Picasso of the Pier’ and ‘The
Gasman Cometh’, it seemed like a good subject for another joint venture.
So, in January 2009 we started work on the research and scriptwriting. We
found several books about Enigma, which together with the now almost
inevitable internet searching, provided most of the basic information.
We decided fairly early on that we would tell the story through the eyes of
an imaginary person who had been at Bletchley Park throughout the war and
who had seen all of the developments first hand. It was only much later that
I discovered on the internet a brief biography of Joan Clarke, who was a
codebreaker at BP from 1940 to 1945 and whose story mirrored almost
exactly that of our imaginary hero. An example of life imitating art, or is it the
other way around? So, Joan Clarke became the model for our narrator.
The location photography was made on two visits to Bletchley Park in May
and July 2009. Although we had a fairly tight shooting script by the time of the
first trip, not everything went exactly to plan.
First off, the Bletchley Park mansion was undergoing repairs and we had
to contend with scaffolding and builder’s vans.
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