War on Plastic with Hugh and Anita
BBC1

The ever-buoyant enthusiasm of Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall (inset, left) is not enough make the doom-laden message about plastic use anything but apocalyptic. In BBC1’s War on Plastic with Hugh and Anita, looking up at the skies over a Bristol shopping centre, Hugh’s reflections on the millions of plastic particles in the air took on a suitably biblical cadence: they are, he said, “raining down invisible all around us”.

That horrible thought was the least of the problems highlighted by the first two episodes (10 and 17 June) of War on Plastic. Water bottles we know about (1.8 billion of them thrown away each year in the UK alone), and wet wipes (that fatberg), and even the trillions of plastic particles from man-made fibres that get filtered into the oceans via our washing machines (subject of the equally horrifying BBC documentary Drowned in Plastic earlier this year), but it doesn’t look as though anything much is happening to change things.

Consumers are still buying bottled water under the impression that it is full of delicious glacier-fed goodness. Hugh gave out bottles of tap water to shoppers, pretending it was some posh new mineral water: everyone fell for it. Meanwhile, the engagingly forthright Anita Rani (inset, right) asked residents of a single Bristol street to put out all their household plastic, from bathrooms, kitchens and garages: it came to tens of thousands of pieces.