How frightful! The teenage killer in the Nest can’t even talk proper
The most watched Netflix series of the past few days is the true-crime documentary Tiger King: Murder, Madness And Mayhem — a story that can only be described as gobsmacking in the same way as a boxing glove in the teeth from Tyson Fury.
Charting a feud between three utterly eccentric and possibly deranged zoo owners in the southern U.S., Tiger King introduces us to a charismatic cult-style leader with a trailer park full of girlfriends, an heiress rumoured to have fed her first husband to her big cats (she denies it), and a gay cowboy who makes country music videos with his two husbands.
It’s packed with so many ludicrous soundbites and violent threats that the aftermath — caught on film — of a tiger attack in which a keeper’s arm was ripped off seems like just another day at the zoo ... a zoo with over 250 tigers.
This has serious implications for the BBC, which has never dreamed of a documentary so lurid and outlandish. Last month, by comparison, Aldo Kane fronted Tigers: hunting The Traffickers, an investigation on BBC2 into farms in South-east Asia, where big cats are bred for meat and ‘traditional medicine’. It was worthy and dull.
Faced with competition from online streaming video upstarts Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube and now Apple TV+, the old-fashioned Beeb must strive to keep all its output suffering the same fate.
If it can’t, a generational divide will leave millions of millennials paying via the licence fee for a service that holds no interest for them.
That applies to drama as much as documentaries, and The Nest (BBC1) is a painful example of how heavily weighted the Corporation’s shows are to older audiences.
The Nest stars young actors, but it sees them through middle-aged eyes. Samuel Small plays Jack, an A-level student about to head off to Cambridge, until he falls for an unsuitable young woman and announces he is going to chuck his place at uni.
Tsk, tsk, dear oh dear, young people today, eye-roll . . .
The unsuitable young woman is Kaya (Mirren Mack), a teenager who is not just a murderer but thoroughly common with it. Wouldn’t you know it, tut-tut, I blame the parents.
Kaya is pregnant, carrying a baby as a surrogate for childless couple Dan and emily (Martin Compston and Sophie Rundle).
But we never get to understand what Kaya really feels, because this is a thriller and we can’t guess if she’s evil or not.
All the sympathy lies with Dan and emily, who are wealthy thirty- somethings. It’s their emotions we are channelling.
Mack has been excellent, but the other teens are just part of the plot: they’re not real people.
It’s hard to imagine any teenage viewers believing in these characters or feeling The Nest has anything to do with them — like too much BBC output.
The tropical romantic soap opera of The Good Karma Hospital (ITV) is so overflowing with emotions that it doesn’t matter if you believe in the characters, or even remember their names.
There’s Doctor Buttoned-up, the repressed but efficient englishwoman who yearns for Doctor Flashy- eyes, with his arrogance and his smoulder.
Their boss is Doctor Kinddragon, who lives with Blokey Beachbum, the guy with a seaside bar. All this is immaterial, because what we love about Good Karma is its brilliant colours and the heat that seems to radiate from every shot.
When we’re all stuck indoors, it offers a glorious escape. India’s hubbub has never looked more enticing. Flowers, monkeys, dusty villages. But no tigers.