I am going to lead this TV preview with two of the most controversial statements I have ever made in my career. Hold on to your hats, or … horses. Hold on to something. Statement No 1: I don’t really think we should be pumping sewage into the sea, or the waterways. “Oh, it’s actually all right,” you, a bigwig water boss, keep trying to explain to me in a patronising voice. “It’s not fully raw sewage. It’s been treated a bit. Stop swimming in the sea if you have a problem with it.” No, thanks, actually! I don’t think we should be pumping sewage slurry into the water round our island! Although I do think both the action (pumping sewage into the sea) and the reaction (broadly doing nothing and saying nothing) is, arguably, one of the sharpest analogies for the state of the British psyche that we currently have. Don’t kick up a fuss about the sea sewage, please! It’s rude. The water companies’ profits might be hurt.
Statement No 2: I don’t think it should be the job of Joe Lycett to have to do something about it. This is not in any way a slur on Lycett – whose career I’ve enjoyed for a long time and whose recent Channel 4 popularity glow-up has been hugely entertaining and also a joy to see – it’s just more a question of sheer logistics and the current state of British politics. This feels like a job for MPs, doesn’t it? This feels like the whole reason governments and councils and stuff exist. To stop things happening like sewage being pumped into the sea. No? All right fine, no. You’re right, the host of Travel Man should definitely be dealing with it instead. Maybe after this John Bishop can run the RNLI.
This, I suppose, is half the point of Joe Lycett vs Sewage (20 February, 9pm, Channel 4), a documentary I would advise you finish your sandwich before watching. It is ludicrous that we’re letting water companies seep sewage into the sea (Point 1) and it’s completely absurd that Joe Lycett is apparently the only one willing to do anything about it (Point 2). But vs Sewage leans hard into that absurdity, and as a result is a lot better for it.
Here’s something Joe Lycett is very, very, very good at: being so charming and disarming to people that they break whatever staid character they were about to do a to-camera piece in and instead become instantly more fluid and human and normal. He does it when talking to wild swimmers on the beach at Bognor, and he does it in a sewage processing lab at Cranfield University (“It stinks!” he says, cheerfully dashing past their Welcome to Reception sign). He does it with Gary Lineker, whom he recruits for a deliberately silly stunt involving a podcast, a broken toilet and the Royal Albert Docks. He does it by getting Jon Sopel (“Journalist and broadcaster Jon Sopel, what are you doing in the bath?”), Phil Daniels and Deborah Meaden to appear in wackily high-concept set-piece explainers. He makes pointing at a whiteboard and showing the incestuous hiring policies between the water companies and the water services regulators into something you do a big, clown-honk laugh at. It is, truly, a new benchmark in “making a point while making ’em laugh” documentaries, and should be studied and heralded as such.
But I find it so hard to move past the fact that this even needed to be made in the first place. How does sewage end up in the sea? Well, the UK has a combined sewerage system, meaning rainwater and wastewater go into the same pipes, and their capacity can sometimes be exceeded through heavy rainfall. In those circumstances, the system overflows into the sea, where the sewage part of it is theoretically diluted by the heavy rainfall part of it. That’s legal, and baked into the system design, and no I’m not in love with it either.
The problem is this: water companies pay out dividends to their investors, reforming the sewage system would cost billions that would cut into those dividends, and so they are not incentivised to do it. Lycett does all the right things to confront this – he makes light of a ludicrous infrastructural problem, does it with enough silliness and levity that it bloodies the water companies’ nose by doing it, and then calls for you – yes, you, sorry, you are going to have to get involved – to take action. All really great stuff. It’s just: after the oil thing and the Truss thing and the Beckham thing and the Braverman thing … wouldn’t it be nice if someone other than Joe Lycett actually bothered to sort stuff out? Anyone? Is anyone in charge, at all?
