Q&A with David Baddiel, Co-Creator, Co-Writer and Executive Producer

How would you describe Hunting Alice Bell, and what inspired the story?

I’d describe it as a psychological thriller, with more emphasis on the psychological than you get in a lot of thrillers. There’s a sense of dread, uncertainty and mystery, rather than guns and police procedure. It’s about how we live now, when people can create rumours, myths, lies and identities for others that don’t feel as if they belong to them. It’s also about truth. At one level, it’s a whodunit — or perhaps a “who is it?” story.

The original inspiration was a documentary I saw a long time ago called Being Maxine Carr. After Maxine Carr was released, she was given lifelong anonymity. But women with no connection to her were being targeted in small towns by people who were certain they were her, living under another name. There were four women in the documentary, and a couple of scenes in the show are based on what I saw. In one, a woman has just moved to a new area when rumours start. Within a couple of weeks, there’s a mob in her garden, shouting at her. She comes out with her passport to prove who she is; that stayed with me.

People who’ve seen the series tell me they want to watch the next episode, so on a simple level it seems compulsive and watchable. But it also asks some big questions about how we live now.

Why explore that subject through a fictional thriller rather than another documentary?

The documentary had already been made, and it’s quite chilling in itself. But it’s also out of date because there was no social media in it. As I worked on the idea, I realised how much social media could turbocharge this story. It’s an enormous rumour-mongering and targeting machine. When a troll decides to target someone, they can build a huge crowd around them online, which can then spill into the real world.

There are real examples of this, but no single story that illustrates all of it. I had the idea of women being mistaken for an evil figure and working together to fight the rumours. Social media became the motor driving that targeting, and that led to the drama we have now.

Did you do further research into the subject as the series developed?

Lucy Letby was an important point of reference. The idea of Alice Bell — a nurse secretly having an affair with a murderous anaesthetist — was in my head, and in Peter Bradshaw’s, before the Lucy Letby case. But while we were in the writers’ room, it was very much in the news. I thought there was an extra resonance in the idea of a woman being a nurse, someone associated with giving life, being suspected of taking it.

I’ve long been interested in how certain women become these super-evil figures in our culture. Myra Hindley and Maxine Carr, for example, can become more notorious than the men they’re associated with. I think there’s something gendered in that. I also noticed the rise of the internet amateur sleuth: people broadcasting from the site of a death or disappearance, saying they know exactly what happened and gathering followers. The internet can create certainty around a mystery. When you’re writing, you’re watching the world at the same time, and an idea that’s been percolating for a long time changes to keep up.

Why did you choose Fran as the audience’s way into the story?

We wanted to spend time with a woman and her family who felt very ordinary. People often associate this kind of thing with celebrities — someone does something wrong, and then they’re cancelled. But ordinary people can be perceived as having done something the internet decides is wrong, and suddenly their lives feel completely out of control.

I wanted the audience to spend enough time with Fran and her family to imagine themselves in that life and see it destroyed. Then it becomes a twist when you discover it’s happening to other women, too. Some have families; some are single. They’re all different, but you’ve had time to sit with Fran before realising it isn’t just her.

How central was uncertainty to the story?

I always had the idea that these women would fight back. Individually, they aren’t strong enough to do that, but together there are five of them. They decide to tell their story publicly, although it isn’t a straightforward decision.

Once they do, outside forces — newspapers and people online — start talking about them. What felt like a unified group begins to crumble under that scrutiny. We’ve created a society where we all feel looked at. We’re designed to feel watched by a handful of people, but now we can feel watched by the whole world. That creates suspicion and uncertainty. Something you believed in can suddenly feel full of holes.

Part of the story is about a group of women fighting off a mob, who then begin to feel like their own mob. Is one of them Alice Bell? That creates a propulsive whodunit for the viewer, but there’s a bigger question underneath: are we psychologically able to live without suspicion?

Maybe we aren’t.

What did you want to explore about misogyny through the way the women are targeted?

Part of it is the focus on women who’ve done something wrong, compared with the many men who do wrong. Maxine Carr was, at one point, considered one of the most evil people in Britain, even though Ian Huntley was responsible for killing two girls. Women can be invested with an idea of angelic goodness, and then, when they fail us, with an extraordinary sense of evil.

Women commit far fewer violent crimes than men, and yet we have this roster of evil women we’re obsessed with. Alice Bell’s name also deliberately carries a trace of Mary Bell, a woman who killed children in the 1960s. These figures become famous partly because there are so few of them compared with the number of men who commit crimes.

I’m a man, so I don’t want to overstep, but I wanted viewers to feel the vulnerability of these women. Some are stronger than others; they all have secrets and their own cracks. I think that vulnerability would be harder to feel if the story were about five men.

Why are people so willing to believe and spread accusations about people they’ve never met?

I think it’s primarily about drama – people want to dramatise their own lives. We want to have an interesting, exciting life, and terrible events are dramatic. The internet lets people get close to a story, sometimes literally by going to the place where something happened, they can show themselves as part of it.

It’s also a way of creating a public identity. Social media can look like a marketplace of ideas, but really it’s a marketplace of identity. True Crime Buster is a troubled man, but he’s created an identity for himself as a superhero and an online vigilante. It makes him feel like a big man and a hero fighting for a cause. That’s dysfunctional, but I think it’s very real.

How does social media affect the way people argue about divisive issues?

I think the issue itself often isn’t the whole story. Whether it’s vaccines, trans rights or the war in the Middle East, imagine the conversation without social media — with people not performing in front of an audience. The conversation would still happen, but it would be less angry and furious.

People are frightened of humiliation. When you think hundreds of thousands of people are watching and you might lose the argument in public, you get angry. You just want to win, and nuance gets lost. True Crime Buster wants to be right about one of these women — Fran or somebody else — because he has a tribe of followers who see him as a hero for finding the truth.

The series has social satire as well as thriller elements. How did you balance the tone?

With some difficulty, and by cutting quite a lot of jokes. Peter Bradshaw and I originally wrote more comedy, but we had to be careful. If you put in too many jokes, you disrupt the dread, fear and momentum of the story.

But people in terrible situations do still make jokes. Humour is a way of dealing with what’s happening. There’s a moment in the first episode when Fran and Nick are talking about how you can’t reason with a mob: people believe what they want to believe. Nick mentions the real case of a paediatrician whose house was burned down because people thought he was a paedophile. He points out the absurdity of people apparently thinking a paedophile would put a sign outside his house saying so. I remember the actor, Rudi, asking, “Is this meant to be funny?” I said, “Yes.”

I wanted the show to move between tones without losing its central feeling of dread. Serious situations can be memed and joked about online; that doesn’t make them any less serious.

How did you plot the mystery across six episodes?

It started as a film. Peter and I wrote a movie that never got made, as happens with most movies. Then we tried to develop it as a six-part television series, which meant expanding the story and plotting it carefully. We brought in two experienced television writers, Polly Buckle and Kate Verghese. We wanted women in the room because the story is about five women.

The main work was figuring out how to make a cliffhanging mystery that kept developing across six episodes, with red herrings, deeper characterisation and secrets being revealed. It took months. We went down rabbit holes and had to abandon ideas that didn’t feel real.

When we came to the dialogue, I still wanted jokes where they felt right. In episode three, at the feminist conference, Fran’s line from an earlier episode has become a catchphrase online.

People are calling for her to say it, and she doesn’t want to — until eventually she shouts it. The internet turns serious situations into jokes and memes, but they remain serious underneath.

Was there a moment on set that particularly stayed with you?

The cast were brilliant. Alex Roach is amazing throughout. We shot all the house scenes together, and it was wonderful watching Alex, Rudi and the young actors, Mason and Aiyana, become a believable family.

But the moment I loved most was when Simon Pegg came in to play Dr Jason Nash. We only had him for about four days. The first scene we shot was a flashback of Jason being interviewed by the police. Simon played it very straight and realistically. I said, “That’s brilliant. Can you just give it an edge — more psychopath?” He did, and I got goosebumps. Suddenly there he was: Dr Jason Nash, and he was terrifying. It was one of those moments when you realise how much a great actor can bring to a scene. There’s so much good acting throughout the series.

What did director Paul Walker bring to the production?

Paul and I got on incredibly well. I was showrunning, which involves you in almost every part of the production. Paul said, “It’s your show, it’s your vision. Be on set as much as you want. I’ll make it work.” The two of us found a way of working together that really worked. We had three months of shooting, a lot to film in a short time and little opportunity for reshoots. We never came to blows or disagreed. He was kind, ego-free and focused on making the show work.

What do you hope audiences will be discussing after watching Hunting Alice Bell?

Primarily, it’s a thriller and it’s entertaining. I hope people are drawn into the characters and the situation and want to know how it plays out. I’ve always been interested in stories, and I think this is a very involving one.

People will probably discuss the revelations at the end. But I also hope they think about how it’s an unusual way to make a thriller, because it’s trying to say more complicated things about how we live now, and how the world tries to make everything black and white: good and evil.

The conversation about Alice Bell is intentionally obscured throughout the show. Later, it’s suggested that perhaps she isn’t the monster we thought she was and, ultimately, that’s the moral of the story.