WHAT’S HOT TO WATCH TODAY
I HAVE to be brutally honest with you: tonight’s mustwatch programme is actually going to be 90 minutes of pretty depressing telly.
No, I don’t mean Bournemouth v Crystal Palace on Sky Sports Premier League (7pm), but a seriously disturbing documentary called DROWNING IN PLASTIC (8.30pm, BBC1).
We’ve all seen the reports about plastic pollution – billions of discarded bottles, bags etc. – and the appalling damage this is doing to our oceans and their wildlife (well, all of us, I guess, except those who’ve been living on another planet, which ironically may well become our best option before long).
But witnessing its effects up close takes this horror to a whole new level, as wildlife biologist Liz Bonnin very quickly discovers.
For one part of the film, Liz joins rescue workers fighting what looks like a losing battle off the Australian coast, where a particular species, the Flesh-Footed Shearwater, unwittingly eats more plastic relative to its size than any other creature in the ocean. Seabirds, it seems, routinely mistake bits of plastic for food.
A tearful Liz looks on as one of the team patiently helps a rescued chick regurgitate all the garbage in its stomach. It seems to have swallowed about ten pieces. The record is 260.
Later she heads to Indonesia, where the world’s most polluted river, the Citarum, has come to resemble one huge plastic slick – and where nearly two-thirds of fish species have died out. “I just can’t see how people can cope with this,” she exclaims. “I mean, look at it, just look at it...”