‘It’s terrifying’: How Andrew Tate and the ‘manosphere’ influenced Netflix’s Adolescence

That bastard of a show,” says Jack Thorne, with a ­chuckle. “It cast a long shadow over all of us.”

It’s hard to imagine Thorne, a British dramatist whose prodigious output and obsessive work ethic are the stuff of legend, being jealous of another writer – but Gwyneth Hughes’ Mr Bates vs the Post Office was no ordinary television drama. It changed things. After it was broadcast in Britain in January last year, public fury at the real-life scandal reignited, leading to the prime minister announcing new legislation to exonerate and compensate wrongly convicted sub-postmasters.

“As someone who’s spent his life trying to write political TV, it was quite difficult hearing, over and over and over again, that this is what a TV drama can do,” Thorne says. “I was immensely jealous. I hope that something I write someday will have the sort of impact it had.”

In truth, Thorne’s career is not lacking in impact, whether on TV (National Treasure, His Dark Mat­erials, Help), in theatre (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), or, less frequently, in film (Enola Holmes). But a Mr Bates-like effect on public and politicians alike remains his holy grail.

I meet 46-year-old Thorne in a gleaming glass office building behind St Pancras station in London. He is so prolific – a word he hates: “it sounds like I don’t care” – that at any one time he has numerous projects in the pipeline, but we begin by ­concentrating on his two latest Netflix dramas.

Ado­l­escence takes on the spec­tre of youth knife crime with a story, shot in Sheffield, about a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a fellow pupil. We speak only three days after 15-year-old Harvey Willgoose was stabbed to death at his school in Sheffield, UK. Nobody can deny Thorne has a feel for the zeitgeist.

The first project, Toxic Town, released last month, is the real-life story of the Corby ­toxic waste scandal, in which large numbers of children in the Northamptonshire town were born with defects during the 1980s and ’90s. In a case dubbed “the British Erin Brockovich”, a group of cour­ageous local mothers took the council to court, convinced that the rushed, poorly regulated reclamation of the local steelworks was ­res­ponsible for poison­ing them and their unborn children.

Toxic Town is a classic David v Goliath tale. It has wit and heart – “I wanted to find a tone like Shane Meadows did for This Is England: hard-­hitting, but not ­miserable,” Thorne says – but also a burning sense of anger and injustice. “It felt like we needed to have a conversation about waste in this country. [British Prime Minister Keir] Starmer announced today a nuclear expansion program, but is waste factored into the cost of this? Because if it isn’t, we are going to repeat exactly the same mistakes, and it’s going to be the same [working-class] communities that pay the price.”

Last month, Patrick Spence, the producer behind Mr Bates and Thorne’s coming phone-hacking drama, The Hack, admitted neither of these serious-minded series would be made if they were brought to the table now, in the more ­cautious commissioning climate of 2025. “They’re unfund­able,” he told the entertainment news website Deadline. “It’s culturally devastating.”

Yet Netflix has thrown money at a story about waste ­mismanagement in the East Midlands. “I feel the responsibility of being the show that proves that there is an audience for this sort of work,” Thorne says. “And I’m ­terrified, to be honest, that we won’t find that audience.”

He is unable to reveal much about The Hack, which is based on Nick Davies’ investigation into phone-hacking at News of the World and stars David Tennant, but will say that while the legal lines in Toxic Town were complicated to navigate, those for The Hack, which will air on Stan, were almost “imposs­ible – you’re dealing with some very powerful people”. He is also keen to point out that his drama comes to praise journalism, not to bury it, by showing how Davies’ investigation helped right a wrong. “Writing a show about journalism that journalists will judge? It’s a stupid thing to do,” Thorne concedes. “It was a hard show to have written, and I’m very frightened of it, but I’m proud of what we’ve done.”

Frightened is also a word he uses when discussing Adolescence, but for very different reasons. The drama, which he co-wrote with its star Stephen Graham, is among Thorne’s very best work and feels, unusually for him, deeply personal. It was Graham who approached him with the idea of doing something on knife crime and of shooting each episode in a single take – the actor’s Boiling Point collaborator, the one-take king Philip Barantini, directs – but the themes of fatherhood and masculinity are mined from Thorne’s life.

As well as taking us inside the criminal justice system as it processes a minor accused of murder, the drama is a startling exploration of the pressures faced by young men and boys in Britain. A researcher suggested Thorne and Graham should look at the misogynistic online world of the “manosphere”.

“As soon as we opened that box, it made sense of everything,” Thorne says. “The show is not an anti-Andrew Tate thing. The videos the kids are watching are a lot darker than Andrew Tate, and the people giving out their advice are a lot more dangerous than he is. It’s terrifying. I’ve got an eight-year-old kid and it made me want to put him in a box and keep him there for the next 10 years.”

The accused boy, Jamie (played by Owen Cooper, a remarkable newcomer), is a confused mess, unsure of his masculinity, filled with loathing for himself and others – particularly women – conflicted by the idea of incels, pick-up artists and alpha males. Thorne admits the drama contains his fears as a father, but also some of his own “rage”.

“[Director] Phil, Steve [Graham] and I talked about that a lot, and we have all felt, at different times, challenged by being white men, and being honest about that is at the heart of the show,” Thorne says.

There is also a lot of Thorne in Jamie. “I remember being that kid who didn’t fit,” he says. “I’m autistic, and that was the story of my teenage years. I am not saying Jamie is autistic, but I do remember thinking of other people: I see no way of involving myself in your conversation or your life. I rem­ember really, really hating myself, and I think those aspects are in Jamie. A real, profound self-hatred.”

Thorne wrote Adolescence while he was working on an adaptation of William ­Golding’s Lord of the Flies (also coming to Stan). Last summer, he could be found flitting between rehearsals for the two shows, ricocheting between one troubled teenage boy and 40 of them.

Thorne hopes we can find sympathy for them, whether it’s the tormented Jamie or the savage Jack in Lord of the Flies, a character he believes the author handles “with a lot more love than we [tend to] remember. The book can be dismissed as a load of public schoolboys on an island being nasty to each other, but I don’t think Golding wrote it like that. We’re all capable of doing these things. And trying to understand that, I think, is one of the things drama can do.”

Juggling at least two projects at once is very much Thorne’s methodology – “I’ve always found great comfort in working” – though “when you’re a writer who’s lucky enough to get work made, you do worry a lot about whether you’re making too much”, he says. “Whether you’re denying other people their voice, sitting in other people’s spaces and telling stories they should be telling.”

The Telegraph, London

Adolescence and Toxic Town are now streaming on Netflix.

Stan is owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead.

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