(Credit: Netflix)

Black Doves creator Joe Barton has opened up about how a real-life scandal involving spy cops inspired his new Netflix thriller.

The show stars Keira Knightley as a politician’s wife who has an affair with a man in London’s criminal underbelly. However, it is soon revealed that she is secretly a member of the Black Doves spy organisation, and she has been living a double life.

Barton, who previously created The Bastard Son and The Devil Himself for Netflix, told Radio Times that he first began to envision the show when he was reading about a real-life unit of London’s Metropolitan Police who lived under fake identities for decades while working undercover. They were known as the Special Demonstration Squad, and dozens of officers infiltrated left-wing groups over a period of four decades.

One of these SDS cops, Bob Lambert, even wound up fathering a child with a member of the London Greenpeace organisation he was investigating under his false identity.

“I had been reading as well about those spy cops, those guys, and they infiltrated that environmental group and had ended up having children with it,” Barton explained. “I mean, a really horrific story, much darker than this. But I was like, OK, that idea, that duplicitousness of having a pretend marriage lasting years and years and years, and then it’s disappeared. That was really part of, I think, the inspiration for it as well.”

Barton cycled through a few different cover identities for Knightley’s character before settling on the life of a politician’s wife. He revealed, “I think there was one where she was a journalist—well, a pretend journalist—but she has to be close to power.”

The Lazarus Project creator also revealed that he began writing the show on a whim during the festive period. He remembered, “I’d had a couple of different ideas floating around my head, like I’d been wanting to do something spy-esque. I had this idea about these two characters that were friends and I had a few different scenes in my head. Everyone was away; I had a few hours, so I just started writing it. I ended up writing pretty solidly for a week and finishing it on New Year’s Day.”

Writing over the holidays must have seeped into Barton’s thinking process because he wound up setting Black Doves at Christmastime. He said, “I always wanted to set something at Christmas, I haven’t managed to do it really before. It’s so sugary and cheerful, but actually quite a dark time of year for many people, and literally a dark time of year. It’s all these contrasting ideas around it, so it seemed like quite a natural time to set a thriller.”

Viewers can immerse themselves in Barton’s duplicitous world of espionage and the holidays when the six-episode season is released worldwide on Netflix on December 5th.