Five secrets from the set... Mrs Wilson
We go behind the scenes of the BBC1 period drama…
Mr & Mrs
1 The original idea didn’t have Alison as the focus. ‘We thought about doing one episode with each woman in Alec’s life or telling the story from Alec’s point of view,’ says writer Anna Symon. ‘But having read Alison’s memoir, her story was key to making it emotionally compelling.’
Family advisors
2 Alec’s surviving family all read drafts of the scripts and shared their memories. ‘They were generous in allowing me to use the truth of what we did know, so it became a combination of taking amazing source material and filling in gaps,’ says Anna.
India in Northern Ireland
3 The majority of the series was filmed in Northern Ireland, which was meticulously turned into London, Yorkshire and colonial India. ‘The research that went into it is phenomenal,’ says Anupam Kher, who plays Shahbaz Karim, Alec’s handler in Lahore.
Alec’s secrets
4 Little is known about Alec’s work as a spy so Anna was inspired by the espionage novels he wrote from the 1920s to 1940s, nine of which were republished in 2015 and 2016. ‘I think there are parallels between what he was writing and what we know he was experiencing as a spy,’ she says. ‘But the intelligence services still won’t release documents pertaining to his work…’
Time travel
5 The drama covers several different periods, from Lahore in the 1930s to London in the 1940s and 1960s, and the cast frequently moved between the eras, often within a single day. ‘Iain Glen and Keeley travelled through three time zones,’ says Ruth Wilson.
‘It has been fun jumping between eras but the ageing wasn’t fun!’