Kingdom (BBC One, Sunday) opens on the sprawling savannah of Nsefu, in the heart of Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park. “For five years,” a familiar voice tells us, “we’ve been following the remarkable story of four rival families, all striving to make this place a home.”
I say “familiar”, but this is none other than the voice of God himself, David Frederick Attenborough, narrating the latest big-ticket nature documentary for the BBC’s natural-history unit.
Compared with the Planet series – Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Frozen Planet – a show like Kingdom may seem smaller fare. There is no globe-hopping here: our gaze remains upon the squabbles within and between four factions of wildlife in a single, if seemingly vast and abundant, location.
But any fear that this will lack its predecessors’ scope is quickly banished, as Attenborough and co offer a deep dive into an ecosystem with more than enough drama to fill a series.
After a brief introduction we’re treated to an aerial tour of the various regions of Nsefu, in a manner that doesn’t so much gesture towards Game of Thrones’ opening titles as beat you over the head with them. We meet a lion pride, a wild-dog pack, a hyena clan and a leopard ... family. (Our spotted friends drew the short straw when all the cooler-sounding collective nouns were given out.)
We are given pleasingly anthropomorphic introductions to the dramatis personae: Olimba, the leopard matriarch, and her headstrong cubs, Mutima and Moyo; Storm, the alpha female of the roving wild-dog pack now returning to the area for the first time in many years; Tandala, the hyena matriarch, who seeks to hide her food from the rest of her clan during pregnancy; and lastly a stately lioness overseeing her own faction, who must assert dominance both within her own family and against these other threats, and bears the only slightly less euphonic name of Rita.
Where Kingdom excels is in giving you a sense of the complex hierarchies at play. One leopard may take on a wild dog, for example, but cringe in submission against a three- or four-strong pack. A single hyena, meanwhile, holds little fear of even two leopards, but two or more can be run off a kill by a lion.
The swelling strings, the glorious camerawork and the sheer craft of capturing such incredible footage cannot be overstated. This is nature film-making at its best. But it is in the field of narrative storytelling that Kingdom excels. So propulsive are its soapy thrills that you can’t help getting wrapped up on a human level.
When the boisterous leopard Oyo picks a fight with a mud-bathing hippo, my heart is in my mouth. When he and his mother track a hyena standing over a kill, I begin to worry that their spotted camouflage makes sense in the dappled sunlight of dense woodlands but makes them look exposed and vaguely preposterous on the savannah, like American army officers wearing desert khaki at the Pentagon.
How come hyenas are so big – did I know this before?
Why does Storm, the wild-dog alpha, have a collar around her neck, and how did her pack take to it when she rocked up with it one day?
Good God, will that antelope escape being eaten by her pack? Oh good, it will!
Oh shite, a crocodile!
If all is right with the world, Attenborough will turn 100 in May, just four years younger than the BBC with which he and the natural-history unit’s crews have been synonymous.
In a week that has seen the Beeb attacked on variously spurious grounds by ghouls on both sides of the Atlantic, it may be useful to remember what it does better than anyone else in the world, and what would be lost by casting that institution aside for the benefit of people who care less about accuracy in the media and more about stripping its carcass bare and bloodying their noses in its flesh.
That is, of course, my opinion, and as I don’t work for an embattled broadcaster that seems hell-bent on aiding others in its destruction, I’m glad I’m free to give it.
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Speaking of blood and ghouls, It: Welcome to Derry (Sky Atlantic, Sunday) is now three weeks into its exploration of the Maine town at the centre of much of Stephen King’s work, most notably It, his killer-clown saga.
To people like me, who were born and raised in the slightly more real place named Derry, the fact that King set so many of his most famous works in our namesake has always been a fun little fact to pass along. This show has now ruined that pleasure, but I’ll try not to hold that against it.
A prequel to the recent It films (and helmed by their creators, Andy and Barbara Muschietti), this HBO series brings us to Derry in the early 1960s, with a boy missing and horrible events befalling its inhabitants. We see the toothsome lawns and ironed petticoats of a gentler age, atop the broiling, seething “darkness behind the white picket fences” trope of the American horror canon.
It’s only fair to concede that King did as much as any other single person to popularise this form – and so should be granted some ownership over its thousandth retread – but a cliche it remains nonetheless.
Similarly, it’s hard not to compare Welcome to Derry to Stranger Things, as that show’s own “enterprising young high-schoolers fight forces of darkness unseen by adults” plot was, again, cribbed quite self-consciously from King himself.
Nevertheless, the show’s tonal shifts between wisecracking kids on bikes and intermittent blasts of grisly horror – not to mention sideways jaunts to mysterious goings-on at a nearby military base – are difficult to view without those very same aspects of the world’s most popular television programme coming to mind, often with diminishing returns.
Where Welcome to Derry innovates, however, is in the gonzo application of its pulpy scares. Its first couple of episodes feature some properly gruesome body horror – mutated demon babies, human-skin lampshades, tentacled pickle creatures – and precisely zero appearances from Pennywise, the demonic clown who made the series’ name.
This lack is not a big issue, and holding back its most famous IP may well serve the show better than hoisting a red balloon from a manhole straight out of the gate. Unfortunately, those more chilling elements sit side by side with other, more pedestrian set pieces – one bizarrely breezy graveyard chase would not look out of place in Casper the Friendly Ghost – within an overarching plot that feels inert and lifeless, its family dramas rote, its explorations of race plodding and worthy.
All of which leaves its scattergun blast of jump scares – most especially its egregiously repetitive use of traumatic birth imagery – feeling a little uneven and, at times, too campy for the series that contains them.
Silliness is, of course, no enemy to horror. On the contrary, Welcome to Derry would benefit greatly from a little more of it – or, better yet, a more balanced application of its duelling tones, whether straight-faced or ridiculous, so that both coexist without feeling they were made for different shows. Something is lost when the veil between these two instincts is punctured. In the end, a balloon is only any use until it pops.
