ending

Andrew Hodges (who wrote 'Alan Turing: The Enigma', which was the basis of Hugh Whitemore's stage play 'Breaking the Code' and the subsequent television dramatisation) writes:

Filmed for television in a naturalistic suburban setting, rather than on a timeless, expressionist stage set, Breaking the Code inevitably sacrificed many of the elements that made it grip theatre audiences. No stagecraft magic of Derek Jacobi's real-time changes of age: instead the teenage Turing was played by a young actor.

The adapted script also lost some of the more special moments of the play. For instance, on the stage, Turing reveals the logical secret of the Bombe on his last holiday on Corfu, but with the irony that it is revealed to someone who does not understand a word. On the television screen, his explanation is given to an Intelligence officer 'John Smith', all irony lost.

Hugh Whitemore also dropped the words at the death scene, and supplied an anticlimactic ending, a voiceover explaining the dubious honour done to Alan Turing by having part of the Manchester Ring Road being named after him. But this sudden shift into 1990s documentary mode holds the danger of dating very rapidly, and also prompts the awkward question of what Alan Turing is supposed 'really' to have done, which is even less clear in the television film than it was on the stage.