Catch up TV

Episode 20 October 2025

Documentary tracing the extraordinary story of amateur codebreakers Satoshi Tomokiyo, George Lasry and Norbert Biermann, who collaborated across continents to decipher a mysterious cache of coded letters which were discovered to be from Mary, Queen of Scots.\n\nWith whispers of spies and a treacherous son, the unlocked codes bring new insights into Mary’s long years of captivity in Elizabethan England, her power plays, complaints and clandestine methods for communicating with her followers.\n\nSet against Mary’s dramatic journey from infant queen, through civil war, to abdication and years of captivity, this film examines the lengths Mary went to conceal her words, and the ingenuity needed to decode her letters today, even with the help of 21st-century computing.

Source: BBC 2