BBC's Honey creator reveals how Killing Eve prequel sets itself apart from the original Jodie Comer hit

“Voluntarily putting a listening device in your house? The Stasi would kill for an Amazon Echo!” Emma Moran is marvelling at the unexpected timeliness of her new BBC series, following a deep-cover spy in 1980s’ East Berlin.

“When I was writing Honey, there was a lot going on in the world about humanity breaking through totalitarianism, people enduring and finding community as superpowers clashed. That hasn’t gone away, unfortunately.”

Honey stars Ann Skelly as Martha Schmitt, the alias of Carolyn Martens who, viewers may recall, was played by Fiona Shaw in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s smash hit espionage thriller Killing Eve (oddly, Skelly bears a spooky resemblance to both Shaw and Jodie Comer, that show’s breakout star).

By then, she was head of MI6’s Russia Desk. In Moran’s Honey of the early 1980s, however, she is a rookie agent run by her “warm, fatherly” handler (Rory Kinnear) and soon caught between “loveably misogynist” CIA agent Aaron Neeland, AKA Kurt Fischer (Nate Mann) and “nerdy, smoulderingly intense” Stasi counterespionage head Friedrich Bauman (Jannis Niewöhner).

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The new time and place ensures Honey’s parent show doesn’t cast too long a shadow. “I wanted the tone to be like sisters, as opposed to making Killing Eve part two,” Moran says. “I genuinely forgot about that show at points, because the goal was just to make something good that stands on its own, without trampling on the source material.”

While the Russian invasion of Ukraine put paid to the original concept of Carolyn in Moscow, East Berlin (represented here by the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius) still offered “a rich playground” for Moran to inject some humanity, fun and romance into a setting seldom associated with any of those things – although she was alert to not trivialising a traumatic period for those who lived through it, drawing inspiration from the tragedy of The Lives of Others and the comedy of Good Bye, Lenin!.

“We really wanted to humanise the so-called bad guys,” she says. “Friedrich, for example, is a nuanced character with wants and desires like anyone else. I tried to look at the Stasi as not this grey monolith, but more like the Microsoft of East Germany with annoying bureaucracy, inept co-workers, impenetrable hierarchies, office clowns…”

Moran grew up in rural Northern Ireland, “seeing the world through television” and her dad’s favourite comedies – The Fast Show, Peep Show, Father Ted – alongside a few American genre classics, including Buffy and The Simpsons – “I could recite the first 10 series to you, word for word.”

While studying at UCL, she started performing sketches and stand-up (“a safe space to be unbelievably bad”) in person and online, before chafing at the restrictions of social media’s 90-second format. A masters in screenwriting was hijacked when, while part of the BBC’s Comedy Room initiative, she won a screenwriting competition for unrepresented female writers, run by Killing Eve and Honey producers Sid Gentle Films.

“That was Extraordinary,” she says, referencing her 2023 superhero sitcom. “I don’t think they expected it to get commissioned, they were more throwing me a bone, but I just got lucky with the timing because Disney+ was launching and wanted something young and quirky.”

Despite four BAFTA nominations and warm reviews, Extraordinary only lasted two seasons; Moran’s disappointment, though, was eased by the entirely new challenge of Honey, where “the plotting has to be intricate and there have to be stakes, while keeping the humour and levity”.

Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell (showrunner for Killing Eve season 2) were in the vanguard of young women creatives blazing a trail, and Moran is grateful. “I’m glad I didn’t have to be at the absolute forefront of it and feel like I was representing ‘all women’, which feels like a massive, unfair burden. I’ve also been lucky to work with really female-dominated teams – although we do let men come in now and again! – so I find it quite natural.”

While she didn’t speak to any spies (“that I know of”), Moran worked with former BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera (see right) to ground even the most outré of Honey’s Cold War spycraft – a dog costume, a prosthetic scrotum – in some sort of reality. And while she was only born in 1993, Moran was keen to embrace the 1980s without fetishising them.

“We wanted to keep colour and largesse in make-up and hair, grounded in actual 1980s East Berlin as opposed to what the 80s looked like in the West. Our production designer, Erwin Prib, lived there at the time and was incredibly helpful. I’d written a scene where Kurt throws a rotten banana at Martha, and Erwin pointed out they didn’t have bananas in East Berlin back then. I also accidentally used a Germanic slur in reference to a dog. Basically, he stopped me from causing a diplomatic incident.”

With ideas percolating for a second series of Honey and filming on her Netflix adaptation of Bella Mackie’s thriller How to Kill Your Family underway, those early days in stand-up seem a long way away. “Oh, yeah. Stand-up is great when it’s great. When it’s bad, it’s the worst thing a human being could ever experience. I’m very happy with where I am right now.”

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The first two episodes of Honey air Saturday 14 November at 9pm and 9.50pm on BBC One. Catch up on BBC iPlayer.

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