There’s a particularly fascinating documentary on Channel 4 this week, though the reasons it is fascinating bleed a little outside the edges of the actual 90-minute documentary, which I suppose is fascinating in itself. It’s called Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax (Monday, 9pm), and at some point we will all have to sit down and ask why there’s always something weird going on in Hampstead. They get away with it because they’ve got nice doors on nice houses, but there is always something odd going on there.
The story that starts Accused off is intriguing enough: in 2014, two children, aged eight and nine, claimed their father was running a Hampstead-wide satanist paedophile ring. Their school was implicated, and so suddenly 175 Hampstead-based parents and teachers looked up from salting their aubergines for a moussaka to realise that, hold on, they were at the heart of a storm. As was quickly discovered, the children had been coerced into making false allegations by their mother’s new partner, and as the children went into care the couple fled the country. But the stain of “satan-worshipping paedophile ring” lingered long around Hampstead, particularly in murky corners online, and turned into a small but feverishly contested conspiracy theory that pulled in a crowdfunded American knife-wielding vigilante, a woman labelled the “UK’s worst troll”, and a leading practitioner of “face yoga”.
“That sounds like a podcast,” you’re thinking, and you’d be right: the Accused story has already been covered by Hoaxed, a Tortoise media podcast, in 2022. Podcasts have been leading the way with true-crime stories for years (the grey area-ness of this crime made it ripe for investigative journalism: for a long time, the police were stumped by what crime had actually been committed, and who to charge for it) and, by extension, the public hunger for true-crime stories has skyrocketed. As a result, TV – always so quick to react! – has slowly increased its churn of true crime-style content, both documentary and drama, both based on real stories and not. A good example of this was the documentary Death on the Staircase in 2018, which became the drama The Staircase in 2022 (there is also a BBC Sounds podcast that retold the story and an Apple podcast). It was interesting, sure, but did we need to be told it, four times? Perhaps not.
So we all agree that true-crime podcasts have had an impact on television. Accused feels like a punch from television back: it is undeniably podcasty, but it has carefully constructed visuals, so it is definitely a television experience and not something you half-listen to while you’re tidying your living room. Director Emily Turner interviewed a number of the affected parents, whose lives were harrowingly upturned by the proliferation of the story online, and got actors to lip-sync their accounts to maintain their privacy (this effect is weird, if I’m honest). She also managed interview access with Sabine McNeill, who was jailed for harassing a number of the accused mothers, as well as Rupert Quaintance, a US activist who flew to Hampstead to investigate the story but was jailed for nine months after putting people in fear of violence. So far, so podcast, but making it something you look at rather than listen to does make a difference in terms of how gripped you are.
These interviews, too, are where the documentary spins off into something more interesting than itself. They are an artefact of the particular moment we’re living through, and how quickly conspiracy can grip people – even thousands of miles away – when disseminated online. There are shades of the infamous Pizzagate story here: claims of abuse, but also that blood rituals and satanism were involved; people with vigilante intent misdirecting their energy and making the whole thing 10 times more chaotic as a result; forum posts that escalate very quickly into real-life confrontations.
That this happened in Hampstead is interesting (always something weird!) but also perhaps self-fulfilling – would a US blogger have flown to a deprived community in Hull if it were rocked by the same allegations? But the question you keep asking yourself, as your eyes stretch ever wider at how big and out-of-control this story got, is: how can completely normal, intelligent adults get sucked into such a strange and false story so much that they start yelling outside a church about it? Watch Accused to see just how many people are one Facebook post, one slip into a conspiracy rabbit hole, away from prison.
