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”.
