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War on Plastic with Hugh and Anita, in case you’re think might refer to Hugh Jass and Anita Hugnkiss, is actually food-botherer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his assistant is Anita Rani, who, in the early part of the last decade, once was part of BBC3’s 2005 midnight slot “Destination Three”, who said in a pre-Twitter era that we could contact them by texting them by opening the text with “ME”, and continued, “So, text ME. That’s ‘ME’ as in ‘me’, not ‘M.E.’ the disease! (laughs)”
Oh, how hilarious, love.
But about this, and the scaremongering starts early, stating “Every minute of every day, the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastic is emptied into the world’s oceans”, with Hugh staging a scene to make it look like a rubbish truck is about to shoot its load into the sea, when we know that it’s not, but there will be idiots watching this who have the BBC’s number on speed-dial, ready to complain that he IS doing that.
But that’s BBC documentary propaganda in 2019, similar to how David Attenborough’s Climate Change: The Facts threw in a load of doom-mongering music, and scenes to make it looks like Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich were directing it.
This sort of handwringing bollocks really annoys me. 90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from the Third World, and most of what doesn’t, is from discarded fishing nets. The UK does enough about recycling, so when it comes to Hugh and Anita, perhaps they should have a chat with police forensic specialist Dexter Morgan? He likes plastic sheets…
Then we can all watch TV without those two blame-shifters blabbering away.
Hugh wants to know how we solve this. Erm… talk to the Third World? And also accept the fact that plastic IS good. I reuse plastic bags, but I also love plastic straws and plastic cotton buds. There is currently no better alternative for the same price to either of the last two. Straws are great because when I drink Pepsi Max, even my dentist recommends them because it makes the fizzy drink bypass your teeth, and stops it coating them until you clean them later.
Plastic is also used in a number of elements inside cars to make them lighter. If they were solid metal throughout, they’d be heavier and less efficient, and cost more in petrol.
However, back to this programme again, and the first thing the pointless pair did was to have all the houses in one street (not counting anyone sensible enough NOT to take part) bringing out all their single-use plastic items and put them in the street. There wasn’t a single one who didn’t look smug after feeling good about themselves for five minutes as they spouted this bullshit. And no doubt, those NOT involved are those who would’ve given a dissenting voice.
Talking of voices, the trailer for this guff even had a smug, self-satisfied “Our planet matters” at the end, just to make you think that if you use a plastic bag, YOU HATE THE PLANET!!!
As for those involved, one was an incredibly stupid old woman called Kay, who – and never mind plastic – is a big waster of money. These are a pack of six Cathedral City Mini Mature Cheese bars which are just 20g each. At £1.75 for the pack from Waitrose, that’s £14.60/kg. Now, if you buy a 900g block of mature cheese from Aldi, that’s just under £4.00, which makes it approximately £4.44/kg. So, with such a loose hand on economies of scale, Kay would be first up against the firing squad.
Hugh’s idea was to rebrand plastic bottles by putting tap water inside them, copying Only Fools And Horses’ Peckham Spring scam. Aside from trying to fool the public before revealing the truth, one idiot said he believes Smart Water is better for you because “it’s ionised or electrolysed” and that he knows because “that’s what they tell me”, just like all the crap we’re fed as coming from “scientists” about “climate change”.
In fact, as for Smart Water, I saw a bottle in a supermarket selling for around a quid, yet Vue Cinema sell the exact same thing for £2.69. Personally, I’m not against buying a bottle of water on occasion. Usually, I do have a refillable bottle, but if I’ve had a night out in town and want a drink to go with some food on the way home, I’ll happily buy a bottle of water because I don’t want any more alcohol, and the water is ice cold.
Plastic is also good in supermarkets. While this moronic programme picked on one shop showing apples as being 40p each ‘plastic-free’ with other apples being available in a plastic-contained pack of six for 78p – and it didn’t show us that the latter would’ve clearly been different apples, my local Morrisons has 1kg plastic covered carrots for 65p, or for 60p, you can pick your own and put them in a paper bag.
Now, I’ll do that for carrots because I’ll take off the outer skin, but I won’t do it for other fruit and veg where I’ll eat the outside of it, because this fruit is also handled by other people in the store, and a lot of people don’t understand that they’re meant to wash their hands after using the toilet. Similarly, Morrisons also tried having plastic-free cucumbers, but apart from the pissy-handers issue, the lights in the store make the cucumbers start sweating like a Jeremy Kyle contributor, and they look utterly rank,
Other dumb scenes including Anita only just realising that the loose items cost more than pre-packaged ones, to the point where she sent an email to Tesco from her laptop whilst in a café drinking something overpriced rather than saving the environment by taking in her own drink(!) Yeah, like that email was sent right then, and not beforehand, in the office.
Meanwhile, Hugh was abroad, looking at piles of waste and berating with “Wow, look at that! It’s insane! Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like it!”, and other phrases you’d assume he’d only use if he was viewing the horror of Auschwitz for the first time. So, yes, he’s overreacting for the programme. In fact, he spends so bloody long on the topic about exporting waste, when it’s NOTHING to do with any individual viewer, as it’s something that’s only in control of the governments. Okay, so better disposal methods for the plastic should be available, but don’t give us the bullshit that “ALL PLASTIC IS BAD!”
He also showed how it’s not easy to get refills of water for his plastic bottle from petrol stations, and he found this out whilst wasting a shit-ton of petrol by driving around the country. Is this guy for fucking real?!
The local milkman now has a lot more call for milk in bottles to the featured street because the proles are ditching plastic. However, I get my milk in cardboard cartons, and it’s Long Life, so it lasts for ages and doesn’t go off any time soon.
As the programme came to an end, the proles took all their plastic rubbish back to Tesco – so, littering, then. Moaning also came in the form of how wrapping items in plastic, creating multipacks, is making people buy more items than they need, causing food waste. Well, just buy what you DO need – duh!
As for recycling, itself, it would help if ALL the councils used the same colour bins for the same types of waste, and that they actually recycled everything, but once they’ve met their EU targets, they bury it in landfill like they used to do.
Of course, another alternative is for environ-mentals to bury themselves alive. It’d be a lot quieter for the rest of us, and a lot less stuff would be consumed in the whole world. I’m sure they’d actually agree with the latter because they’d be “doing their bit” for their environment.
A far better cause would be to pick up where Jamie Oliver left off in trying to sort out school dinners, changing them for more healthy options. That was a great idea, and it lasted for a while, but New Labour (old Tories) didn’t want to do much about it, and the whole thing just fell by the wayside.
Episode 1 Score: 0/10
War On Plastic With Hugh and Anita continues next Monday on BBC1 at 9pm. It won’t be out on Blu-ray or DVD, but you can see it again on the BBC iPlayer for 30 days after transmission.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.