BBC One's new Cold War thriller Honey is a fictional story and is not based on true events, despite its 1982 East Berlin setting and inclusion of real spy details.
The series follows Martha Schmitt (played by Ann Skelly), a 24-year-old deep-cover agent for MI6. At risk of having her cover blown, she tries to avoid detection by Friedrich Baumann (Jannis Niewöhner), the new Stasi Head of Counterespionage against British Targets, Berlin Office.
The BBC teased: "Finding herself caught between Friedrich and the reckless, arrogant CIA operative Aaron Neeland (Nate Mann), she is blindsided by desire in this Cold War ménage à trois."
A Fictional Story With Real Spy Details
The show's writer Emma Moran explained how initially she was keen to write a rom-com with a "Bridget Jones style love triangle", but adding a spy thriller element on top "weirdly felt quite natural". While the series is set during the Cold War, the story is entirely fictional.
Moran told the BBC: "I found it easy to combine a brutal Cold War setting with comedy. When you read a lot of the history around that time, so much of it feels just completely absurd. When you're trying to squeeze people's really messy lives into a political framework that requires quite defined edges, it naturally becomes inherently silly."
She shared how she did some "baseline research" to make sure they were not going "down the completely wrong road", adding: "But we're not holding ourselves to completely specific historical accuracy in every way as this is a love story, it's not a documentary."
Inspiration Behind the Series
Moran noted that some real spy details made it into the show, including a pair of fake testicles in Martha's spy kit, which she said was "fully ripped from the CIA's own handbook". She added: "The truth is stranger than fiction sometimes."
The writer also referenced the film An Officer and a Gentleman as an inspiration, along with a book of photographs from Stasi archives. She said: "There's this fantastic photo of a Stasi officer who had been surveilling someone, and then there's this photo of his cat on his bed. You just see a little bit of humanity in that moment. They are just people."
Actress Skelly described the series as playing with familiar romcom tropes and characters whilst placing them into recent history, calling it a series about "very oppressive governments with very oppressive political ideology that try to control and infiltrate people's relationships and lives". She added: "But the nature of people and human nature is that we can't help but push through and Honey reflects the resilience of that effort."
Honey airs tonight, November 14, on BBC One at 9pm.
