Paul Whitehouse: Our Troubled Rivers, review: little to laugh at in our sewage-strewn watersne of the best kept secrets in the town of Hay-on-Wy...
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
ne of the best kept secrets in the town of Hay-on-Wye is a bend in the River Wye where a meadow is bordered by a pebble beach. We discovered it last summer, on a sunny day when the water looked invitingly clear. Our younger child paddled and skimmed stones, and our elder plunged right in for a swim. Idyllic, I thought. Until I mentioned it to someone days later, and they told me about the levels of poultry farm waste polluting the Wye.
The impact of agriculture is one of the factors examined in Paul Whitehouse: Our Troubled Rivers (BBC Two). The comedian can often be found standing in Britain’s waterways while filming Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, and considers them to be “the closest thing to paradise that we have”.
But those rivers are filthy. Sometimes that is quite obvious to the naked eye – the programme contained grim video footage of human waste being released into the water – and at other times the effects are hidden. “That pollution isn’t neon, like in films. It’s pretty much invisible,” said Whitehouse as he surveyed a designated bathing spot in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, where untreated sewage is regularly discharged into the river by the local water company.
A campaigner named Mark Barrow went for a brief dip in the Wharfe and emerged five minutes later holding wet wipes and used sanitary towels. As for the waste he had filmed tumbling out of a pipe? “A turd’s eye view,” as Whitehouse put it.
Attached link
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2023/03/05/paul-whitehouse-troubled-rivers-bbc-two-review-little-laughTaxonomy
- River Studies
- Performance Benchmarking of River
- River Engineering
- River Basin management
- River Restoration
- River Engineering
- Water > River Basin Management