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. (Sadly, she was slightly outdone by the site’s manager who recalled the day he had to compact a 50-ton whale.)
Before long, though, things took a turn for the gloomy. Realising how quickly the huge site would fill up, McGavin was understandably struck by the lack of thought we give to our rubbish once we’ve dumped another bin-bag in another bin. ‘How did we reach the point when we throw away so much and value so little?’ he lamented sorrowfully, before stalking meaningfully out of shot.
But as it transpired, this wasn’t a rhetorical question — because from there, the programme interspersed its Dunbar scenes with trips to great landfills of yesteryear. In Great Yarmouth, McGavin pinpointed the birth of the throwaway culture as the 1890s by digging beneath some former sand dunes and discovering any number of late-Victorian bottles and jars.
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