Hunting Alice Bell: David Baddiel and Peter Bradshaw's AI-Age Thriller Leads Tonight's TV

Simon Pegg plays an anaesthetist serial killer in Hunting Alice Bell, the new Channel 4 thriller created by David Baddiel and the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw, airing at 9pm tonight.

The premise: Fran (Alexandra Roach), a suburban mum working at a leisure centre, films a video for her workplace website. It goes viral for the wrong reasons. Trolls conclude she is Alice Bell, a former nurse who helped her serial killer boyfriend Jason (Pegg) and then rebuilt her life under a new identity. As events unravel, Fran learns she is not the only woman forced to deny she is Bell. Who is telling the truth? Is one of them lying? The Guardian's Hollie Richardson calls it "a nightmare that, in this AI world, never feels too far-fetched."

What else is on tonight?

• Celebrity Race Across the World, 8pm, BBC One. The celebrities head for Sulawesi, Indonesia, but face plenty of bus stations and ferry ports first. Phil Harrison finds this year's batch "a uniformly likable bunch" — though some, notably Jeff Stelling, are less willing to forgo creature comforts.
• Murder in Belfast: Sisters Seeking Justice, 9pm, BBC Two. The final episode of John O'Kane's three-parter concludes the investigation into the murder of Robert McCartney. With the IRA's internal inquiry opaque, the McCartney sisters' hopes rest on a trial. The result, Harrison writes, is "revealing in terms of scars that refuse to heal."
• Winter, 9pm, ITV1. Richard Armitage's rogue pathologist, "giving it everything," investigates a potential case of a woman held in slavery. Jack Seale deems this finale of the "defiantly ridiculous" crime series "suitably overheated."
• First Dates, 10pm, Channel 4. Fred welcomes shopping TV host Alexandria, 74-year-old singer Lili and 21-year-old funeral director JJ — "a Ken-lookalike seeking his very own Barbie." Advertising exec William returns, this time looking not for a wife but a husband.
• Ken Loach Remembers: Cathy Come Home, 10pm, BBC Four. Loach recalls making the 1966 play about a family becoming homeless, and the angry aftermath in which the BBC was accused of abandoning impartiality.

Film choices

Avedon (Ron Howard, 2026), Netflix. "He changed everything" is the common refrain in Howard's profile of photographer Richard Avedon — and, per Simon Wardell, the stunning images justify it. The film traces Avedon from shooting merchant marine ID photos to injecting movement and theatricality into Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, alongside political series on the Vietnam war and mental health institutions. A childhood friend of James Baldwin, Avedon emerges as both stylist and polemicist.

ISS (Gabriela Cowperthwaite, 2023), 9pm, Film4. The Blackfish director goes into orbit with a speculative thriller set on the International Space Station. Scientist Kira (Ariana DeBose) joins a six-person crew — half American, half Russian — when nuclear war breaks out, glimpsed through the portholes. Both sides receive orders to take control; the futility is clear as Earth burns. Chris Messina and Pilou Asbæk co-star in what Wardell calls "a tense drama with a sharp edge of despair."

Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966), 9.10pm, Talking Pictures TV. Losey's spy caper is slightly too in love with Bond-style globetrotting and gadgetry to be truly satirical. But Monica Vitti's outlandish costumes and Terence Stamp's suave cockney carry it, with Dirk Bogarde — a would-be exceptional Bond villain — as a louche foe in a proto-Barbarella riot of colour.

The night's sharpest question belongs to Hunting Alice Bell: when an online mob can assign you a criminal past, what does innocence even look like?