Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Anita Rani reveal horrifying truths about the plastic scourge. Photo / Supplied
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Anita Rani reveal horrifying truths about the plastic scourge. Photo / Supplied
Once you get past TV's evening watershed, the shows on offer usually fall into one of the following categories: sexual content, violence or distressing, terrifying imagery.
It's appropriate then that Three's new series War On Plastic has been screening close to 10pm all week - because it's one of themost horrifying shows I've seen in a long while.
Hosted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Anita Rani, this BBC documentary tackles the plastic plague that's literally strangling life on Earth and the ways in which this scourge can be addressed from a personal, corporate and government perspective.
Monday night's premiere certainly opened with a bang, as Fearnley-Whittingstall calmly directed one rubbish truck after another to dump its load of plastic waste directly into the sea.
It was enough to make you sit up and yelp, "That's outrageous! They can't do that!"
Yet, while rubbish trucks (hopefully) aren't dumping plastic directly into waterways, that same amount of plastic is still winding up in our oceans every single minute of every single day. And with that terrifying visual aid fresh in viewers' minds, War On Plastic's hosts proceeded to take us on a journey through this growing plastic wasteland.
Anita Rani presents on the series War On Plastic on TV3. Photo / supplied
Through all three episodes, the residents of an average street in Bristol have been used to demonstrate both the barrage of single-use plastics in our everyday lives and the ways in which we can start to stem that overwhelming tide. While that social experiment develops, the hosts also delve into some of society's biggest plastic culprits.
First up, Fearnley-Whittingstall inexplicably gets a neck tattoo as part of an undercover demonstration of the absurdity of bottled water.
After surprising many people with the fact tap water tastes the same as bottled water, he then gets several brands of the stuff tested to see what's in it. Let's just say the results blow the theory that bottled water is better for us right out of the, uh, water.
Rani, meanwhile, focuses on the scourge of wipes – baby wipes, makeup wipes, house cleaning wipes, bum wipes, teeth wipes, even the wipes one absolute maniac says he uses to clean his utensils with. Because – surprise! – most wipes contain plastic.
Last night's episode also revealed the grim extent of airborne plastics i.e. the tiny plastic particles all around us that are small enough to breathe deep into our lungs. That's not at all unnerving, is it? But the true horror came from Fearnley-Whittingstall's trip to Malaysia to see what happens when countries send their plastics offshore for "recycling".
"It's like a dystopian nightmare," he said as he waded through virtual mountains of plastic that will never be recycled and are often just burned out in the open. And if seeing Malaysian children living next to those burn-off sites, struggling to breathe and dealing with blood noses, doesn't snap us out of our bottled water obsession, nothing will.
Throughout the mini-series, both of the War On Plastic hosts have proven themselves unafraid of ruffling corporate and government feathers as they demand to know what is being done to address the plastic plague. They also can't help but become furious and/or overwhelmed as they dive into these issues around plastics and the business of recycling. And rightly so.
As the series concludes tonight with a scene at a McDonald's headquarters that should make corporate PR teams everywhere shudder, it's clear that while effective recycling solutions are important, it's the reduction of plastic production and usage that really needs to kick into gear. But those gears of change are frustratingly, stubbornly slow.
"We should be scared, maybe we need to be scared," Fearnley-Whittingstall says at one point. "Maybe only by being scared for our own health, for our own lives, are we going to be concerned enough to do something about plastics."
I dare say anybody watching War On Plastic probably does feel that fear right now - but the show's not all doom and gloom. Because knowledge is power, as they say, and they also do a good job in motivating everyday consumers to do something with what they've just learned.
If nothing else, it might finally convince some of us to stop reaching for that bottled water or that packet of wipes. There might even be hope for the chap who uses wipes to clean his utensils. (But I doubt it.)
War On Plastic airs tonight at 9.50pm on Three and is available via ThreeNow.
