Next stop for Tiger King’s carnival of trash is Sausage Castle strip club
Hey, you cool cats and kittens. Grab a gun and strip down to your star-spangled G-strings — the Tiger King carnival of trash is back.
Joe exotic, the drug-addled gay cowboy, failed politician and former police chief, is still in prison. His plea for a presidential pardon fell on the deaf ears of Donald Trump — perhaps the only man in the U.S. with a bigger ego than Joe.
But his nemesis, the ultimate Mad Cat Lady of the internet, is still at large. Carole Baskin — ‘That B!!tch Carole £@&%ing Baskin.’ as she is known to Joe and his supporters — has been widely accused of killing her first husband and feeding him to her tigers, at her big cat sanctuary in Hillsborough County, Florida.
Baskin, naturally, denies this — and as Tiger King (Netflix) returns for a second season, new evidence emerges to vindicate her.
What we also see are strippers gyrating around poles at a club called Sausage Castle, campaigners festooning a private jet in tiger stripes, lawyers with triple beer guts, wild animals on obscene display in a cage shaped into a giant ‘TK’ and men blowing pumpkins apart with shotguns to show us what they’d like to do to Carole Baskin’s head.
Joe is serving a 22-year jail sentence at the Federal Medical Center prison in Fort Worth, Texas, for animal abuse and hiring a hitman to kill Baskin.
He is consumed by bitterness. The Tiger King believes everyone else is getting rich on the publicity from his show, and he wants to see them jailed, too.
We discover more about his past, including his youthful marriage.
At 19, when he was still Joseph Schreibvogel, he was the youngest police chief in Texas — keeping law and order among the 700 citizens of eastvale, near Dallas.
He drove a Pontiac Trans Am with customised flashing lights. ‘He looked like a Christmas tree coming down the road,’ remembers his former sergeant.
At the same time, Joe was working as a male stripper. He started dating the fire chief’s daughter, Kimberley, though he didn’t tell her he was gay. She thought the reason they didn’t have sex was that he respected her too much and wanted to wait until they were married. ‘I was naïve,’ she shrugs.
Though they lack the shocks and twists of the first series, these five new episodes do delve into the mysterious disappearance of Don Lewis, Baskin’s first husband.
We meet Lewis’s associates in Costa Rica, where he had a second home. One neighbour in San Jose says he was nicknamed ‘el Gringo’ and ran a brothel known as the Cursed House.
No one comes out of this series looking good. But the real victims are the animals — such as the clouded leopard Lewis left in a box without ventilation and forgot, or the chimpanzee whose corpse the Tiger King serenaded in a music video.
Maybe Joe was right. The whole lot of them deserve locking away.
There’s no trailer trash on show in Grand Designs: House Of The Year 2021 (C4), though some of the nominated properties reveal equally bizarre lifestyles.
Strangest of the collection was a converted water tower in Norfolk, rebuilt to resemble a rocket launcher from Thunderbirds. Others included a house constructed around a smaller, 1950s building, and another with no right angles.
The tours were hurried, and we had no idea how much the conversions had cost.
Kevin McCloud, shaven-headed with a Tintin tuft, devised odd little introductions for each — making himself a peanut-butterand-jam sandwich, or digging for spare change down the back of a sofa. It all felt very disjointed.