David Baddiel reveals how new drama Hunting Alice Bell explores cultural attitudes on evil and women – and how real-life case inspired it

My upcoming thriller, Hunting Alice Bell, is about mistaken identity. But not quite in the usual way. We live in an age where technology has given all of us the power to present any way we want. But what if it’s other people deciding who you are – and nothing you say can change their minds? What if the way they choose to identify you is as a monster?

The idea came from a documentary I watched many years ago called Being Maxine Carr. Which, despite the title, was not about the ex-girlfriend of Ian Huntley, who murdered the Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002.

It was about several other women, living in different parts of the UK, none of whom had any connection to, or even looked like Carr, but were nonetheless targeted by locals who refused to believe they weren’t her.

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Carr was jailed for providing Huntley with a false alibi. She became a national hate figure, and following her release, was granted a lifelong anonymity order. The tabloids, furious at being denied the chance to pursue her for the rest of her life, began dropping random and misinformed hints as to her possible whereabouts.

This fed into a public desire for vigilante action, and the result, as the documentary showed, was that random women had to sate that hunger. These women were suddenly faced with mobs in their gardens, bricks through their windows, and strangers spitting at them in the street. Some lost their jobs, and none were offered protection by the authorities.

I felt there was something terrifying, but also story-worthy, in this. What if these women had found each other, banded together and come out fighting? In a kind of female “I’m Spartacus!” – or “I’m not Spartacus!” – action.

I originally wrote the idea as a film, I Am Not Alice Bell, with Peter Bradshaw, the film critic of The Guardian. It’s a work of complete fiction, for which that 2008 documentary is only an inspiration. Alice in our story is a nurse, having an affair with – and secretly changing hospital records for – Dr Jason Nash, an anaesthetist with an apparently murderous God complex, played by Simon Pegg. When she is released into the community under a new identity, rumour-mongering leads to innocent women being targeted.

Meanwhile, as we developed the project, expanding it into a six-part television drama, the world was changing, in ways that turbocharged the idea. Social media became its own society-wide force for meting out vigilante justice. You no longer had to live close to someone you suspected of wrongdoing to join a mob; people across the world could now regularly take part in what Jon Ronson, in his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, called “ecstatic public condemnation”. Around any crime or mystery, anyone could now announce themselves as an internet sleuth, here to tell you the truth you weren’t aware you needed to know – like “TrueCrimeBuster” (played by Ralf Little), who is obsessed with the identity of Alice Bell.

The word we sometimes use for this, “trolling”, doesn’t cover it. Trolling implies something and someone small, frustrated man-children in their mothers’ basements spewing abuse. But the power of the internet is anything but impotent, and most of it comes not from pantomime villainy but from a much more realistic force: people thinking they’re doing good.

Like all those possessed by their own righteousness, the mobs – both online and IRL – in Hunting Alice Bell have no interest in detail. As The Traitors has shown us, once people are convinced they are right, evidence is no longer required. Everything confirms your confirmation bias. A passport, a long-term partner – none of it matters. It just proves the cover-up. Denying you’re Alice Bell is exactly what Alice Bell would do.

This type of cancellation is not about celebrities being upset by mean tweets. It’s about devastation happening to ordinary people. The first woman accused is Fran, played by the brilliant Alexandra Roach. In the opening episode we see how quickly her – and her family’s – life is ripped apart by the savagery of tech-driven rumour.

It transpires that this is happening across the country to four other women, played by Amanda Abbington, Emily Barber, Toni O’Rourke and Christina Bennington. The Alice Bell accusation makes them one person, but in the six episodes we discover – and were very lucky to have such fantastic actors landing this – that these are in fact five very different people, with very different histories.

It’s an unusual thriller. There are no guns, no element of procedural. The crime around which the story turns happened well before the action begins. The suspense comes from all the suspicion, rumour and secrets that swirl around the fallout of that crime.

One reason I wanted to write Hunting Alice Bell is to explore our culture’s attitudes around evil and women. Women commit far fewer murders than men, but the women associated with these crimes occupy a disproportionate space in our cultural imagination. Myra Hindley, Maxine Carr, Lucy Letby: very different degrees and kinds of culpability, but all – in the bleakest way – household names.

This is because, perhaps, women are subject to an intensity of attention, aesthetically and morally, that makes their perceived failures more absorbing. Women are held to much higher standards of moral perfection than men, and so, when they fall away from them, are more extremely villainised. There is a fascination and a fetishisation around women and crime, on a different level to that for men.

All five women accused of being Bell discover that not being perfect is perilous. Their flaws might ordinarily make them human – but once they are in the sights of the mob, those flaws make them suspect. And having been subjected to suspicion does not protect the women from feeling it about each other. Will the group formed to fight off the mob become its own mob?

For me, that is where the drama becomes a parable about how we live now. We recognise the destructive force of certainty when it is directed against us. It is much harder to recognise when it begins to form inside us.

Viewers will, I think, be keen to discover which, if any, of these women is Alice Bell, but I hope they might also, as the series comes to a close, ask who Alice Bell is, and why she is being hunted. Good and evil are often not as binary as the thrill of the chase would lead us to believe. It’s possible that the shadow of the monster is so terrifying that you never stop to question whether there ever really was one under the bed.

But at the end of the day, Hunting Alice Bell is primarily an entertainment. People who have watched previews tell me that the episode they’d just watched made them very keen to watch the next one. At the end of my day, as a storyteller, that’s always job done.

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Hunting Alice Bell is on Wednesday and Thursday 11 and 12 November at 9pm on Channel 4.

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