Is there any more alluring aesthetic in screen fiction than the iron curtain thriller? Any TV show dealing in 1980s cold war chic – Deutschland 83, Kleo, Star City, The Same Sky, the Russian bits of The Americans – probably has an irresistible mix of danger, absurdity and exotic kitsch.
Moustaches! Wigs!
Leather trench coats! Rigid patterned fabrics!
Cassette players! Boxy cars!
The chilly ennui of oppressed citizens and the flagrant risk-taking of secret agents, all somehow liberated by an existential inner emptiness! It’s just so much fun.Honey pitches us straight into premium frosty paranoia with an opening scene in which British “press attache” – ie spy handler – Graham Anderson (Rory Kinnear, hoorah!) endures a nervous crossing back into East Berlin, during which he really, really does not want his car to be searched.
The crowning indignity of his interaction with a chortling buffoon of a border guard is when the manchild in uniform eyeballs Graham’s wife, Anne (Sonita Henry – a slightly more niche hoorah if you saw her fine turns in Silo or The Chelsea Detective), in the passenger seat and decides to show off how closely the pair are being surveilled: “Good luck for your smear test on Thursday, Mrs Anderson!”A car chase, a number plate swap, a donning of a silly disguise and some fantastic comic business with a sheepdog costume, and Anderson has achieved his mission and smuggled keen young agent “Martha” (Ann Skelly) into East Berlin at the peak of the city’s murderous intelligence battles. We pick her up again two years later, in 1982, to find Martha thoroughly unstimulated by her low-level honey-trap assignments, conducted under cover as a hot-panted waitress in a dive bar frequented by horny middle managers.
Lure them in, take them home, generate kompromat by photographing them in their underpants, move on.Led by Skelly’s confident performance as a woman who refuses to accept her place in any patriarchal hierarchy, even if it is partly there to stop her getting herself killed, episode one of Honey forcefully announces itself as manna for eastern bloc espionage junkies. The distressed browns and deep greens of its convincingly knackered interiors are on point, as are the era-appropriate European pop needle drops – the daringly brief opening title sequence, soundtracked by Can precursors the Inner Space, is deliriously hip.
It finds ways to give familiar spy scenes a new comic twist: when Martha meets Anderson for debriefing in a room that is bound to be bugged, they foil whoever is listening not by playing music or running a tap, but by blasting a tape of sex noises.When Martha becomes dangerously bored, her reckless curiosity leads her into a fractious but sexually charged alliance with smoothly arrogant CIA guy Kurt Fischer (Nate Mann), and simultaneously a perilous but sexually charged symbiosis with Stasi traitor-hunter Friedrich Baumann (Jannis Niewöhner). Unfortunately, as the season goes on, and Martha and Kurt try to investigate the same mysterious death that Baumann is looking into without him realising they are double-crossing him, Honey settles down a bit too much into predictable comedy-thriller rhythms.
And Martha – who we had hoped would remain forever a pitiless exploiter of feckless men – is rather undermined by the story requiring her to lust helplessly after both the new blokes in her life. It’s a much straighter, more conservative show than first impressions suggest.But if the searing freshness of those first scenes can’t be maintained, and Honey never fully follows through on its early promise to gleefully set fire to the whole spy-thriller genre, it is never less than very entertaining.
Around every corner is a naughty visual gag, an eccentric supporting character or a fantastic item of knitwear that I will try and fail to find on eBay, while the ruthless, relentless Baumann brings a sharp hint of Lives of Others bleakness as he obsesses over other people’s lives without living one of his own.Honey, incidentally, is nominally a prequel to Killing Eve – a selling point that proves to be an entirely superficial link that neither adds nor takes anything away. Martha is the deep-cover identity of Carolyn Martens, and Carolyn Martens is the character played by Fiona Shaw in Killing Eve, but the two series aren’t especially similar in tone and Martens was never crying out for a long backstory, so all that’s a bit pointless.The show that comes to mind more often is the unjustly cancelled Ponies, which ran for one fantastic season this year.
It takes too long to write, film and edit a show for the similarities to be anything other than coincidence, so it’s just unfortunate that Honey ends up a slightly less funny and thrilling Ponies clone, but there is room for both. We’ve always got space for a bit more cold war cool.