Honey: this flirty, kinky Killing Eve prequel should have been called Carré on Spying

The amazing Ann Skelly plays Eve’s spy-handler Carolyn in a steamy, camp cold war thriller set in east Germany. Tagline: ‘everyone is watching – look hot!’

I always found it odd that spy stories are the quintessential interest of middle-aged men. Isn’t spying all about relationships, listening and choosing outfits? Is there something you’d like to tell us, men? Ironically, we don’t seem to have many ways of making you talk.

A female-forward spy story was the highlight of my week. Honey (Saturday 14 November, 9pm, BBC One) is a prequel to Killing Eve, and an origin story for one of its most intriguing characters: Fiona Shaw’s spy-handler Carolyn Martens. A title page lets us know that this is a period piece, while establishing a very un-period tone. We are in East Berlin, 1982, where the East German government run an army of citizen informants. “Everyone is watching … look hot!”

We open on a young Martens smuggled into the eastern sector in the back of a Trabant driven by her handler, Anderson. Renamed Martha Schmitt, she receives her instructions. As a honeypot, her job is to seduce well-placed men and take compromising photographs that will persuade them to pass sensitive information to the west. She’s partnered with an American agent – a chauvinist moustache called Kurt Fischer, which displeases them both. What follows is her battle to be taken seriously as a spy, and not fall in boring love. It’s a struggle familiar to any woman in any job, though perhaps with less eyeball removal.

Created by Emma Moran, the show comes on bright and flirty, with gags, pop songs and knowingly anachronistic dialogue. “That guy was a dick. He never came to any ice-cream socials,” says one worker at a sausage factory, of a murdered colleague whom Martha is investigating. It’s a handsomely shot show, with stylish credits resembling a redacted Stasi dossier. Given everyone will be watching, this Honey is determined to be hot.

Spy purists may be left out in the cold. Honey is, arguably, a music video version of a traumatised country. Supporting characters say fun things such as “Can I get my eggs jammy?” and make meta-textual gags. They’re hardly a representation of the oppressed citizens of cold war Berlin. Martha strides around in a bright miniskirt and thigh-highs. She looks amazing, but more like she’s coming home from a fun night at G-A-Y than a harrowing day in the GDR.

The show offers not sense but sensibility. Martha and Kurt don ludicrous disguises, like Cluedo characters. Martha is given to impetuous acts when confronted with casual misogyny, even on secret missions. Which is right-on – but would probably blow her cover. She meets Anderson in a private room, and to cover the sound of their debriefs, plays hammy shagging noises from a cassette player. The Stasi secret microphone is nowhere near the player, besides which they speak at a conversational volume that eclipses it. The physics doesn’t stack, but it leads to some great running gags.

And come on – this is the Killing Eve universe. The eastern bloc is a model box for the show to populate with its real interests: dressing up, banter, pop-feminism, queerness and light kink. The latter is mostly served up in the person of Friedrich Baumann, a classically repressed Oberstleutnant spy-hunter with the delicate, blue-eyed beauty of a ballet dancer. Cruel yet conflicted, his scenes have a wisp of sexual charge, which gives the series something meaty to chew on.

Baumann is the most interesting part of the show. He’s played by Jannis Niewöhner, an actual German, whose native accent highlights the fruity efforts some of the other actors are forced to make. There is no uniform style to these choices, and several of them sound as if they’re trying to reboot ’Allo ’Allo. Yet the show is so brazen these squeaky seams become part of its camp joy.

Ann Skelly is bushy-tailed as Martha, while Anderson is played with brilliant stuffiness by Rory Kinnear. As Kurt, Nate Mann’s striking resemblance to Aidan Turner’s brush-moustached character in Rivals is useful: both are shows committed to fun skulduggeries, shagging and big wigs. If you’re looking for Anthony Beevor, Anne Applebaum-esque vérité, keep moving. Honey is more Doctor Who than Das Boot. In fact, they could have called it Carré on Spying. I thought it hit a sweet spot, and didn’t worry about the details. I’d have made a terrible spy.