As one employee puts it so memorably in the BBC’s excellent and possibly incendiary new series Thames Water: Inside the Crisis, “Poo is not everyone’s cup of tea”; most of us do not long to spend our days anxiously haunting the Mogden Sewage Treatment Works in Isleworth, west London, where even overflow tanks that can hold the same amount of water as 426 swimming pools are now unable to deal with the rising tide of shit that results from bad weather.
But maybe don’t rule it out altogether. If you’re in the market for a glorious, old-school documentary in which a struggling business makes the calamitous mistake of inviting television cameras to observe its day-to-day activities, you may find that excrement is, after all, very much your thing. Not since the heyday of Gerald Ratner has the word “crap” had so much potential when it comes to the standing of a CEO.
The CEO of Thames Water is Chris Weston, a cherry-faced former army man with (appropriate!) bog-brush hair who wears polo shirts and khaki jerkins, and a leather band on his wrist à la Prince Harry. And what a prize chump he is. It’s quite impossible to take him seriously, and not only because when the series begins in 2024, Thames’s reputation for delivering turds straight to chalk streams is unrivalled. It’s as if he’s on some kind of mid-life gap year. What fun to wear a lanyard!
Waiting to hear if the water regulator Ofwat will allow Thames to increase bills by 44 per cent (a rise the company badly needs, its debts at £15.2bn) in an office that resembles the Mary Celeste (presumably his colleagues are all out desperately attacking storm drains with their rubber plungers), he flips on the cricket for a minute, as if he hasn’t a care in the world. But then, perhaps he doesn’t have a care in the world. His salary is £850,000. His performance-related bonus makes his package up to £2.25m. “Keep calm and carry on,” he intones, ahead of yet another disastrous set of results.
The idea to allow the BBC inside Thames, the UK’s biggest and surely most hated water company, came from Caroline, its head of comms, who believes – oh my God, she really does believe it – that a documentary will allow the company to tell “our side of the story”. What’s the essence of this story? Her synopsis is a snappy “Nobody comes to work to put shit in rivers”, which is one way of putting it. But, alas, wherever the camera goes, we find a crushing stasis. Staff sit around looking hopeless, silently praying to the gods Andrex, Domestos and Aēsop (Post-Poo Drops) that nothing suspiciously brown will be found bobbing anywhere near the Henley Regatta.
Tessa, the company’s director of waste, mournfully announces that Thames is an outlier when it comes to “pollution events”. Esther, its chief operating officer, talks defeatedly of the single, random, broken-down chair that is inevitably to be found on any Thames site. Caroline aims for peppiness, but only ends up sounding like she’s in a St Trinian’s film. “Very well done!” she tells Weston, after he concludes a phone-in with a load of newspaper hacks whose questions could have been predicted by a child. Jeez. It’s not as if he’s been up at Mogden, facing down the tsunami of stools in a protective suit and goggles. He never left his desk.
The manager of the sewage treatment works is a 26-year-old Harry Potter lookalike called Josh, whose team are devoted to him because he does goggle up. Barnaby Peel, the film’s director, asks Josh if it was his childhood dream to run a sewage works, but he’s too busy obsessing about the grit in his tanks to deal with sarcasm. Later, he’ll start to wonder if there’s more to life than doo-doo and watching staff remove their branded T-shirts when they go for lunch, the better to avoid abuse from a furious public – and the series will lose its heart-throb.
Will Caroline’s gamble pay off? Will all this honesty and ineptitude make people see Thames Water differently? It’s perhaps a game of two halves. One worries for the likes of Josh, doing their best in the face of all that humans can flush. For Weston, however, sympathy is in extremely limited supply. He’s just full of you-know-what.
Thames Water: Inside the Crisis
BBC Two
[See also: Paul Brady’s songs of conflict]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age