Pet Shop Boys' Alan Turing tribute to premiere on BBC this October

Made in collaboration with Turing's biographer, Professor Andrew Hodges. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, it was first performed it at the Royal Albert Hall in 2014, as part of the BBC Proms, with the BBC Concert Orchestra and the BBC Singers. For this new version, both the text and the music have been revised. BBC Radio 6 Music will broadcast the 2026 edition on Sunday 4 October, within Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone (8–10pm) and Maconie will also speak to Tennant, Lowe and Hodges about the reworking, including their approach to combining electronic and orchestral music. A man from the future will then air on BBC Radio 3 later the same evening, within Unclassified (11.30pm–12.30am), with Pet Shop Boys and Hodges joining presenter Elizabeth Alker in the studio to discuss the original performance and its revision. Both broadcasts will be available on BBC Sounds for 30 days afterwards. The piece follows Turing's life chronologically across eight parts: his school days and early interest in mathematics, his time at Cambridge, his work breaking the German Enigma machine's codes during the Second World War, his role in the invention of the digital computer and his early predictions about artif...