Matthew Macfadyen's 'Stonehouse' Coming To BritBox in January

The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction 1970s-era tale of real-life Labour MP John Stonehouse, who attempted (and failed) to fake his death and restart life in Australia, is the perfect fodder for true crime TV. It has all the hallmarks of the genre: a husband who cheats on his wife abuses his power, gets in over his head, and then makes dumb decisions. Even better, it happened in the mid-1970s, making it a period piece ripe for prop-and-costume fun, and from the looks of the first trailer for BritBox's Stonehouse, stars Matthew MacFadyen and Keeley Hawes are having a ball doing just that.

The Stonehouse saga is very much a story of its era. Disappearing off the face of the earth after faking one's own death would be impossible in the 21st century, where phones, computers, cameras, etc., follow and track people everywhere. But in the 1970s, when the world was just at the cusp of the Big Brother era and the breakthrough of internet technology, running off to another country, pretending to drown, and then going and living in a third one seemed like it should work, even though in the shrinking post-World War II era, global communication was rapidly changing so that it was no longer so.

But the Stonehouse scandal ran deeper than your run-off-the-mill MP drowning in debt and thinking a quick dip in Miami would wash it away. In 2012, it was revealed that Thatcher's government conspired to cover up Stonehouse's much larger crimes: He was a Czechoslovak secret service agent who had been infiltrating the British Labour government on behalf of the USSR. He could have done much more Cold War damage if he had been more competent or less greedy. Perhaps viewers should be thankful he was both.