'One day, ladies will be walking their computers in the park and saying 'do you know, my little computer said a very funny thing to me this morning!'' Alan Turing, 1951.

Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for History Julia Harrington has commissioned Furnace Television to make The Hero of Station X (w/t), due for transmission on Channel 4 in the autumn. This drama documentary examines the life and legacy of Alan Turing, the brilliant British mathematician who, in World War Two, broke the Enigma code, saving countless lives; who invented the digital computer, pioneered artificial intelligence and was one of the first to discover morphogenesis, the mathematical basis of living things.

Turing was a genius and a visionary who foresaw the digital world in which we now live and who believed machines would one day think. In the eyes of scientists today Turing sits alongside Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin at the table of scientific greats. But he was also openly homosexual at a time when homosexuality was illegal. In 1952 Turing was convicted of 'gross indecency' with another man and underwent so called ‘organotherapy' or chemical castration. Two years later, he killed himself, aged just 41, with cyanide. Disgraced in the eyes of the intelligence and scientific communities, the importance of his ideas has long been obscured.

In the last 18 months of his short life, Turing visited a psychiatr.