Not the most beguiling of titles, I admit, but The Secret Life of Landfill: A Rubbish History (BBC4, Thursday) was a genuine eye-opener. The programme began with Dr George McGavin proudly announcing that ‘What we’re about to do has never been attempted on television before’: a claim that it’s usually best to treat with some scepticism, but that here seemed hard to deny. Certainly, I can’t remember another TV documentary in which the presenters spent 90 minutes digging through (non-metaphorical) rubbish.
At first, the mood was one of rather determined excitement. McGavin twinkled away Scottishly behind his half-moon specs as he bombarded us with statistics about the hundreds of tons of trash that arrives in the Dunbar landfill site — aka the programme’s ‘headquarters’ — every day. Meanwhile, Zoe Laughlin, material scientist and McGavin’s ‘partner in grime’ (geddit?), rooted about in the dirt, emerging with a series of apparently thrilling finds: pill packaging, a digital watch and at one stage even a charcoal briquette.
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