Superb but depraved: BBC1’s The Serpent reviewed

The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net — but I still think it most unlikely that I shall stick it through to the final episode. It’s not the style that’s wrong but the subject matter: do we really want to spend eight hours of life in the company of a smug, ruthless serial killer who murders at least 12 people — and more or less gets away with it?

Up to a point The Serpent has addressed this problem by trying to make the central figure not the killer, Charles Sobhraj, but the persistent Dutch junior diplomat, Herman Knippenberg, who eventually nabs him. But that still doesn’t quite remove the nasty taste you get from watching dreamy-eyed innocents on the hippy trail being seduced by Sobhraj’s patter, prior to being brutally killed in any number of hideous ways, including drowning, strangulation and being burned alive.

It’s especially painful viewing for those of us of a certain age, who might conceivably have found themselves in scenarios like the one so cruelly exploited by Sobhraj. You’re young, naive and on a budget, somewhere remote and exotic like Bangkok, and — hungry for new experiences while trying to save money in order to eke out your adventure — you’re piteously vulnerable to friendly-seeming con men such as Sobhraj, who only want to invite you back to their pool party-friendly apartment out of the goodness of their heart.

One of the early victims was an American backpacker, determined to have just 12 hours more fun before heading to Nepal to sequester herself as a Buddhist nun. Bad mistake! How you felt her helplessness and impotent fury as, taken to a sex club by Sobhraj, she succumbed to the sedatives he’d slipped into her drink, knowing — like some slow-motion horror movie suddenly experienced for real — there was no way she was going to get out of this alive.

Equally well captured was the decadence and indifference of 1970s diplomatic staff.