Adolescence's Jamie at a deskAdolescence's Jamie at a desk

Kemi Badenoch has repeated a conspiracy theory about Adolescence which has been denied by one of the programme’s creators.

The Tory leader told GB News that the Netflix drama is “based on a real story, but my understanding is that the boy who committed that crime was not white”.

In the show, a white boy is arrested after a young girl is stabbed to death.

Posting on X, the right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong told his 1.2 million followers: “Netflix has a show called Adolescence that’s about a British knife killer who stabbed a girl to death on a bus and it’s based on real life cases such as the Southport murderer.

“So guess what. They race swapped the actual killer from a black man/migrant to a white boy and the story has it so he was radicalized online by the red pill movement.

“Just the absolute state of anti-white propaganda.”

X owner Elon Musk replied the post saying: “Wow.”

But Jack Thorne, who wrote the hit drama with actor Stephen Graham, has dismissed the claims.

He told the News Agents podcast: “They’ve claimed that Stephen and I based it on a story, and another story, so we race-swapped because we were basing it on here and it ended up there, and everything else. Nothing is further from the truth.

“I have told a lot of real life stories in my time, and I know the harm that can come when you take elements of a real life story and put it on screen and the people aren’t expecting it. There is no part of this that’s based on a true story, not one single part.”
He added: “We’re not making a point about race with this. We are making a point about masculinity. We’re trying to get inside a problem. We’re not saying this is one thing or another. We’re saying this is about boys.”
Stephen Graham told the Radio Times that his inspiration for Adolescence came from a series of different killings he had read about.
He said: “Where it came from, for me is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?

“Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up north, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?”

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