Comedians regularly indulge in toilet humour, but Joe Lycett has gone one step further and headed for the source in a new Channel 4 special that is all about poo.
The visceral response of gut-churning disgust aside, the issue of sewage in the UK is a fascinating. A subject that once garnered widespread public apathy has now become front-page news, since the scale of raw sewage being pumped into the country’s waterways emerged.
Lycett is determined to explore just what is going on down below: armed with some funny graphics and a host of celebrity friends (anybody for Jon Sopel in a bathtub, a la Margot Robbie in The Big Short?), he’s on a mission to raise awareness of just how bad things are.
As he explains in an early scene, we have a chronic poo problem, caused by water companies discharging raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas. A frightening amount, actually. In 2022, those companies reported more than 384,000 spillages of raw sewage across England and Wales; that adds up to 2.3 million hours of spilling.
As a natty little animation tells us, this is because of an outdated sewage system. Built by the Victorians, the pipes we still use were originally designed to handle the waste of around 40 million people in the 1800s. Now, in 2024, they’re now having to deal with twice that much, plus huge amounts of rainfall. And have they been updated to cope with increased demand? Have they heck: much of that money we pay in bills flows straight into profits instead.
For the most part, Lycett is an affable host, genuinely interested in both the people he’s interviewing and subject he’s investigating, and the show isn’t afraid to get (ahem) dirty. It kicks off with Lycett watching his own waste get processed in a treatment plant and ends with him staging an elaborate prank that involves pumping hundreds of litres of fake excrement into the Royal Albert Docks (you may have read about this) in a ‘publicity stunt’ gone wrong.
Spoiler alert: it’s actually to call out the water companies for doing exactly the same thing. And did we mention him launching a fake podcast (christened The Turdcast) where he interviews Gary Lineker about the time he, erm, followed through in a World Cup match?
But it’s not all fun and games, and if the aim is to spark outrage – well, it succeeds in that, too. At the start of the show, Lycett pays a visit to Bognor Regis’s Aldwick Beach (called ‘Shitwick’ by the locals) and watches a bevy of locals wade into the water for their daily constitutional.
Yes, they know the beach is polluted, but as one of them explains, “this is really important for a lot of these folks, because it’s about mental health.” It’s also a lottery, liable to cause serious illness. So what are the water companies doing about it? As an anonymous whistleblower later explains, the incentive to even report spillages is low. Why would you, when the company could be fined millions of pounds as a result?
That’s bad enough, but Lycett’s explanation (aided by Deborah Meaden of Dragon’s Den fame) of the tangled webs between the supposedly independent regulatory body Ofwat, and many of the UK’s biggest water companies (who operate as a monopoly) is genuinely shocking.
A quick look on LinkedIn (“a sort of Grindr for middle management jobs,” he quips) confirms that yes, many senior managers at those water companies used to work for Ofwat, and vice versa. As Lycett puts it, “You’re not short of job options when you’ve worked as a director at a water regulator. It’s cosier than a pyjama party at Mary Berry’s house.”
Fuelled by goodwill (both public and celebrity), Lycett’s hour-long special is a fascinating, rage-inducing, look into just how broken Britain’s water is. And if Lycett dips too close to plain old silly at times, he can be forgiven: after all, he’s someone who knows how to get his message across on serious issues.
