Channel 4’s Cyberbully (Thursday), written by Ben Chanan and David Lobatto, turned out to be a brilliantly gripping drama, even if the average middle-aged viewer might have found the early scenes as baffling as Finnegans Wake. Teenage Casey Jacobs (Maisie Williams) was alone in her bedroom, although not in the way we used to be: with an LP playing and the latest NME to hand. Instead, she was skyping her friend Megan (‘Hey, bitch,’ they greeted each other cheerfully), while also tweeting, texting, instagramming and wondering who’d hacked into her Spotify playlist and replaced all the good stuff with dreary old Led Zeppelin.
But then she saw a tweet from her ex-boyfriend Nathan: ‘I’m not surprised Casey Jacobs is on anti-depressants. I spent one night with her and it fucking depressed me.’ And with that, she started an online chat with her geeky pal Alex, successfully urging him to hack into Nathan’s Twitter account so she could take revenge.
Except that as she and Alex chatted on, it became clear he wasn’t Alex at all, but someone much older. (Sad to say, the giveaway was his use of the apparently obsolete acronym, ‘Lol’.) Once rumbled, he switched to communicating in a synthetic voice and announced, ‘I help victims of cyberbullying’ — which didn’t prove as comforting as it sounded.
Despite his embarrassing elderliness, the mysterious whoever-it-was certainly knew about computers — for, as Casey realised with mounting horror, he’d taken over hers completely. Not only was he watching her through her webcam, but he’d found her most embarrassing files and threatened to post naked photos of her if she switched him off. And he was there not because Casey was a victim, but because she qualified as a bully, having casually slagged off other people’s online videos, especially those of Jennifer Li, a schoolmate whose tuneless crooning she’d labelled ‘When singers are too deluded for X Factor’.
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