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Nature Boy is billed as the Kes for the 21st Century. Lee Ingleby, 23, plays 16-year-old David, a boy with an affinity for nature who struggles against a cruel society and grim social conditions. For David Witton, the natural world provides a respite from a nightmare of a depressed coastal town terrorised by gangs of teenagers strung out on sex, drugs and misery. The beauty of Barrow's Walney Island and the paths along Hadrian's Wall calm and restore him, while the region's wild animals accept him as one of their own.

David has an extraordinary affinity with animals, but rotten luck with humans. His mother, a heroin addict, has rejected him. His father left him when he was four. Foster families cannot fill the want in him. When David's 14-year old foster sister (whom he tries to protect) drowns in a night of drug-fuelled violence, David runs away, living off the land or eking out a feral existence on the edges of civilisation.

He is on a quest to find his father, a quest that will take him from the industrial badlands, down through the threatened forests of the Midlands, to Kent and the garden of England. Along the road he meets a series of people who have something to teach him, and who in turn are given something by him. "It is a story about loss," says the writer, Bryan Elsley. "David is searching for something that doesnít actually exist. In the end, itís his journey, and what he learns on the way that is the important thing".

For Lee Ingleby, the actor who gives David such a compelling screen presence, the key to his character is stillness. "I'm always playing troubled teenagers," says Ingleby (he gave a harrowing performance in Junk, the BBC 2 drama about drug addiction). "But David was something different. I'm naturally a bit of a flapper. I talk with my hands and jump about a lot, but for David I had to become very inner and still. And that's a bit of a risk, because it can just look as though you've forgotten to act. But when you really work at it, you can say a lot through stillness."

For Ingleby, the worst moment of the three-month shoot was being bitten by a macaw. "It kind of gets you in its beak and just squeezes and squeezes until all the energy drains out of you," he explains, wincing. "And foxes smell terrible."

It is not an easy drama to watch. In the end it is the pitilessness that gets to you. "David is holding out his arms all the time, but he's just not getting anything," says Ingleby, summing it up. This is the image from Nature Boy that refuses to leave you, and that in itself is salutary, for, as Ingleby says, "We all knew a kid like David at some time in our life. He's the kid you forget."

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This page was last updated February 27, 2003

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