The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer, review: it turns out that watching people boring a big hole is, well, boring

The Victorian sewers can no longer take the strain of London's waste - Paul Grover
The Victorian sewers can no longer take the strain of London's waste - Paul Grover

A three-part documentary called The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer (BBC Two)? Who says terrestrial TV is going down the toilet? Filmed over the course of three years, this stinker of a series followed the construction of a whopping tunnel, seven metres wide and 20 miles long – that’s wide enough to fit three double decker buses through – directly beneath the Thames. 

If successful, this huge engineering project will relieve pressure on the Victorian system built by Joseph Bazalgette 150 years ago to serve a city of 2million. The capital now has a population of 9million, rising by 100,000 every year, pushing the old network to breaking point. When it rains, the system can’t cope and excess gets released into the poor old Thames.

The first episode focused on the first stretch in East London, as lead engineer Emmanuel – a comedy Frenchman in the vein of Fred Sirieix from First Dates, he saw cesspools as “romantique” – supervised the building of an 80 metre-deep shaft and made it leak-proof using a risky technique called “slipform”. This involved pouring concrete non-stop for 15 days, which wasn’t as visually exciting as it sounds.

Indeed, that was the problem with this film overall. Boring a big hole was, well, boring. This impressive feat of civil engineering simply didn’t translate onto the screen. Too much grey concrete, too many shots of the sludgy-brown Thames, which certainly isn’t the blue that EastEnders title sequence would have you believe. 

Engineers and surveyors, likeable as they were, tended not to be the most charismatic characters. Hard hats and hi-vis workwear made them all look the same. Their talk of “access shafts”, “diversion pipes” and “critical inner linings” was like eavesdropping on a drab corporate conference. 

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Narrator Lee Ingleby (a fine actor whose voice you might have recognised from Line of Duty, Inspector George Gently or The A Word) did his best to drum up excitement with a bombardment of sewage stats, copious alliteration (“these bespoke behemoths”, “the concrete cavalry has arrived”) and by supersizing everything (super-sewers! mega-pumps!).

The full gamut of production tricks were pulled out of the bag: time-lapse photography, swelling strings on the soundtrack, injections of jeopardy. There was more talk of faecal matter than a schoolboys’ sleepover. Even Boris Johnson popped up to crack a gag about “going through the motions”.

There was the odd informative nugget here – 29m tonnes of toxic raw sewage overflows into the Thames each year, in case you were thinking of swimming in it – and flashes of human interest. Pump-installer Steve (catchphrase: “pumping poo with panache”) got a phonecall on camera informing him that his first grandchild had been born and became endearingly tearful with pride.

Construction engineer Nick insisted that setbacks weren’t problems, they were “a solution opportunity”. Night-worker Sunny, smoothing the concrete lining with a 50p sponge, declared himself “the Leonardo DiCaprio of finishing artists”. The producer politely pointed out that he probably meant Leonardo da Vinci. 

Ultimately, though, this was exactly what it said on the tin: three hours of telly about sewage.  It belonged on a niche cable channel – Dave, Discovery or even BBC Four – rather than primetime BBC Two. Too much excrement, not enough excellence.