Why would Thames Water invite TV cameras into its operations for a fly-on-the-wall documentary? “Nobody comes to work to put shit in rivers,” says the company’s communications director near the start of Thames Water: Inside the Crisis (BBC Two). “At the end of day, it is about helping people not to totally hate us.”
Are we helped? Certainly, frustrated frontline staff emerge as victims of the financial meltdown of the UK’s largest water company. At the giant Mogden sewage plant in west London – a site normally off-limits to outsiders because it is classed as critical national infrastructure – employees struggle with old equipment to keep “the beast”, as they call it, from spilling its guts whenever the heavens open. Veterans of 30 years bemoan the lack of investment and cuts to the workforce over many years.
