Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.radiotimes.com
There’s an intriguing premise at the heart of this Channel 4 drama. It’s inspired by the real-life cases of women who have been targeted by vigilantes wrongly believing them to be Maxine Carr, the former accomplice of Ian Huntley who is now living somewhere in the UK under new identity. This programme asks: what if these women fought back?
Written by David Baddiel and film critic Peter Bradshaw, it begins with a bang, only to end, if not with a whimper, then with a lingering sense of missed opportunity.
Alexandra Roach plays Fran Da Silva, an ordinary woman with an ordinary job, a nice husband, a mithering newborn and two bickering teenage stepkids. Then, out of the blue, Fran is accused online of being former nurse Alice Bell. She was the lover of anaesthetist and serial killer Jason Nash (Simon Pegg), the so-called ‘Sandman’, and has served time for enabling his crimes by falsifying hospital records. Bell has since been released into the community to live under a pseudonym.
Initially adrift, isolated and terrified, Fran finds community and support with four other women facing the same accusation: pugnacious PR worker Vanessa (Emily Barber), Amanda Abbington’s nouveau riche Julie, computer whizz Ros (Toni O’Rourke) and Christina Bennington’s vulnerable addict Charlotte.
Once the sisterhood has been established, the opening episodes are exhilarating, as the Not Alice Bell five take the fight to their accusers online and IRL, while the seeds of suspicion are slowly planted that not every one of the quintet may be quite as they seem. There is much fun to be had at the expense of the online ecosystem, with a few famous podcasters gamely sending themselves up and the shifting sands of public sympathy neatly illustrated through TikTok memes and Reddit rants.
Towards the end, though, critiquing online lynch mobs and amateur sleuths – while enticing us, the viewers, to play the game as well – proves too difficult a balance to maintain. As it becomes apparent one of the Not Alice Bell five might in fact lack the crucial qualifying characteristic and that central bond fractures, moral compasses go haywire. Seemingly in thrall to the twists and turns required by the thriller genre, certain characters act in ways that strain credibility to breaking point, something all the more noticeable after the careful build-up. (The ‘character filming a documentary’ trope has probably also had its time.)
Still, the provocative exploration of self-righteous, frequently misogynistic online trolling and the feeding frenzy of an ill-informed, self-perpetuating rumour mill is effective up to that point, its evocation of panicky paranoia genuinely potent and at times squirm-inducingly tense.
Want to see this content?
This page contains content provided by Google reCAPTCHA. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as Google reCAPTCHA may use cookies and other technologies. To view this content, choose ‘Accept and continue’ to allow Google reCAPTCHA and its required purposes.
Accept and continue
Pegg and Ralf Little make a little screen time go a long way as the monstrous serial killer Jason Nash and his craven factotum the True Crime Buster, but this is a drama which is refreshing for the manner in which it places men on the periphery. They are either well-meaning (Fran’s husband Nick), incompetent (the police), plot devices (Nash’s surviving victim Darius, Charlotte’s controlling ex-boyfriend Liam) or, like Nash and TCB, outright antagonists eventually rendered pathetic when stripped of their weaponry.
All of this allows the central quintet – Roach and Abbington aside, they are relative unknowns – to shine. Happily, each of the leads make their big moments count – Bennington is especially impressive in a difficult role. But Alexandra Roach’s achievement here poses the question: why isn’t she in everything?
Her performance is the glue holding this sometimes unwieldy and eccentric series together, right through to a final 15-minutes, which are among the strangest and most unsettling of the year. This climactic scene smartly avoids flashy fireworks or a lazy cop-out in favour of something altogether more peculiar. That said, without Roach, you might suspect the oddness to be unintentional; with her, it sends a delicious shiver down the spine. Flawed, then, but frequently fascinating.
Hunting Alice Bell launches on Channel 4 on 11 November.
Add Hunting Alice Bell to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more.
Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
