Killer Net

"Remember to keep your distance."

Killer Net, originally transmitted in May 1998 on Channel 4, and now available on both Amazon Prime and YouTube, is a competent thriller with a few modest things to say about the internet. It features attractive young people having lots of sex, throws in a few gory murders, and finally falls to pieces when a wildly improbable serial killer is introduced all but twirling his metaphorical moustache as he plunges damsels into distress. This kind of sexed-up drama was pretty much par for the course back in the 1990s, and certainly on Channel 4, but the series was highly controversial and drew much criticism from reviewers and other journalists. However, it wasn’t the sex and the violence that caused the backlash in this case, but instead the criticism focused on the writer Lynda La Plante’s age, and the related offence of her having opinions about computer games and the internet.

Almost all the contemporary reviewers were obsessed with La Plante’s age. Joe Joseph of The Times suggested La Plante’s script was “like seeing your friend’s mum suddenly describing everything as wicked and asking about tickets for Glastonbury and showing off her track marks.” Similarly, hip young journalist Danny O’Rourke (40 at the time) wrote that Killer Net was “like watching a middle-aged raver trying to impress a teenager – gruesome stuff.” The young stripling Adam Sweeting (43) bemoaned “La Plante’s ridiculous middle-aged fantasy about Internet culture”, while the always down-with-the-kids W. Stephen Gilbert (51) wearily complained that the series suffered from “a middle-aged notion of how the young speak… [and was] about as real as Jackie Collins.”

In the pre-planning stage of Killer Net, La Plante herself had herself considered whether she should write the script or leave it to someone younger. In an interview with The Bookseller she explained that “One of the girls in my office wanted to be a writer and loved the idea [about a killer who uses the Internet], so I asked her if she would like to start doing the research. She did it with such enthusiasm that I asked her if she wanted to try to write it.” Ultimately, La Plante fell out with the “office girl” and completed the script herself in three months. It’s possible that the dialogue might have been better and the young characters more believable if a younger person had been more directly involved. Only a couple of years before, the series This Life had been a smash hit, and much of its success was attributed to its 30-year-old creator and writer Amy Jenkins and her sure touch with the reality of of her characters and their milieu. But it’s the nature of the criticism of La Plante that looks very dubious in retrospect. A woman in her 50s writing about characters in their 20s, must of course be characterised as the sexist stereotype of an embarrassing mum.

The criticism didn’t end there. La Plante is repeatedly lambasted for getting too big for her boots. In these days of multi-hyphenate celebrities, it seems very quaint to see her getting it in the neck for having multiple credits on Killer Net. Nancy Banks-Smith in The Guardian references the credits and rather cattily remarks that the series is “directed by Geoff Sax (Lynda being otherwise engaged that day.)” Ultimately, this litany of grumbles is best summed up by Barbara Ellen in The Observer “La Plante seems to suffer from delusions of visionary genius but Dennis Potter she ain’t.” Yes, La Plante might have set up a production company, delivered a host of successful series, and generated loads of jobs and revenue in the television industry, but ultimately, forget all that because she’s not Dennis fucking Potter.

La Plante’s biggest crime, however, was to have opinions about the internet, or as it was known back then, the Internet. In several interviews she gave to promote Killer Net, La Plante detailed some of her concerns. She’d seen her 15-year-old nephew playing a video game which involved a rape, she’d read about internet chatrooms used by paedophiles to groom children, and sums up her worries in an interview with The Times by saying that “the Internet is not a toy to be played with and it has a dark side that is very frightening.” She added that “the Internet was not policed or monitored and was radically affecting some very young minds.” These comments now, especially in the light of Andrew Tate, and the toxic masculinity of much internet culture, as examined in Jack Thorne’s recent television series Adolescence, seem perfectly reasonable. Back then, La Plante’s comments led to many disparaging remarks, and indeed a whole article in The Guardian by David Bennun which attempts to rebut her views and leads to his conclusion that “we are no more and no less at risk from the Internet than from the postal service or the phone network.” I’ll leave you to judge whose views have aged the better.

It's the fury of the response to Killer Net that looks so odd today, with so many sledgehammers deployed to crack a tiny nut. Need to Know/NTK – a high-profile IT/media website of the time – lost the plot to the extent of setting up a spin-off website specifically to attack the series. Incredibly, the site is still there, and it’s a weird display of petulance from self-appointed gatekeepers who simply didn’t approve of a woman in her fifties trespassing on their turf. There are a handful of errors about IT in Killer Net but they really don’t justify this level of derision and attention.

Killer Net can be criticised for a lot of reasons. It falls apart dramatically when the silly serial killer enters the scene, and its more promising aspects, such as the introduction of the Milgram experiment, are not fully worked through. But ironically the series got a critical hammering because of its most interesting aspect. In exploring toxic masculinity, the addictive nature of video games, and the cruelty of nascent social media, La Plante was on to something, and it was her critics that were wide of the mark.

Next time: “Is something brilliant happening?”

Sources in chronological order: 

Nicholas Clee, Don’t let down the governor, The Bookseller, 13 March 1998, p30

Carol Allen, Netting a Prime Suspect, The Times, 1 May 1998, p40

Barbara Ellen, No Title, 3 May 1998, p161

W. Stephen Gilbert, Television Choice, The Times, 5 May 1998, p50

Joe Joseph, Out in the Desert, Beyond Reach of Parody, The Times, 6 May 1998, p43

Nancy Banks-Smith, Now that’s what I call voyeurism, The Guardian, 6 May 1998, p19

Donny O’Rourke, Terminally un-hip hacker, The Scotsman, 9 May 1998, p28

David Bennum, Net losses, few gains, The Guardian, 18 May 1998, pC8

Adam Sweeting, More like a weed than a Plante, The Guardian, 25 June 1998, pB27

 

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