The Fountain of Filth

We were watching Channel 4 last night, Hay and I, in that slightly dutiful way you watch programmes that you suspect will irritate you but feel you ought to absorb, like taking a bitter pill for civic hygiene. It was Dirty Business, which turned out to be less drama and more documentary wrapped in drama clothing, which is a modern genre in its own right. Everyone glowered meaningfully, water companies twirled invisible moustaches, and rivers were presented as victims of something between neglect and organised crime.

None of it was especially surprising. Anyone who has walked along a British river recently and noticed the slightly apologetic smell will have grasped that something is amiss. You do not need a BAFTA winning script to explain that infrastructure designed when Queen Victoria was still experimenting with widowhood might struggle to cope with modern Britain and its enthusiasm for flushing everything that will fit down a pipe.

This morning, over coffee, Hay said, quite casually, "You should Google the Fountain of Filth." This is the sort of sentence that lands without warning in retirement. Thirty years ago it would have involved a regulatory investigation. Now it involves Channel 4 and a sculpture of citizens vomiting symbolic sewage into a basin while a bronze capitalist showers himself in money. Progress, of a sort.

So I did Google it.

The installation itself is exactly what you would expect. Large. Earnest. Vomity. The artistic equivalent of holding someone’s head under the water and saying "look what you’ve done." Perfectly legitimate as political theatre. London is full of statues celebrating far worse things.

What was more interesting was what wasn’t there.

The Guardian had covered it. The Independent had covered it. Both entirely predictably, like Labrador retrievers reliably fetching whatever stick of environmental outrage is thrown into the pond.

But the BBC? Nothing obvious. No prominent reporting. No sober voice explaining that yes, there is a sculpture, yes, it is meant to make you uncomfortable, and yes, this relates to a long running structural problem with privatised monopolies and regulatory capture. The BBC these days behaves like a man who has accidentally walked into a domestic argument and is trying to leave without anyone noticing. It senses danger in acknowledging anything that might be interpreted as political, so it quietly backs out of the room and pretends it was never there. It is not impartiality so much as timidity dressed up as virtue.

And then there is the right wing press. The Telegraph. The Mail. The Express. The Sun. Not a peep. Not a splash. Not even a discreet dribble.

This, too, is entirely logical. Because the Fountain of Filth is not just a sculpture. It is a visual summary of a deeply inconvenient argument. It suggests that in this instance privatisation has prioritised getting money out over putting investment in. That regulated monopolies, protected from competition and gifted predictable returns, can settle into a cosy equilibrium where dividends flow more reliably than infrastructure upgrades.

That is awkward territory if your paper’s politics requires privatisation to be inherently virtuous and public ownership to be inherently slapstick. Much easier to say nothing. Silence, after all, cannot be fact checked.

None of this means the programme itself was neutral. It was plainly campaigning television. It simplified, dramatised, and moralised. But that is what art and television do. They provoke. They exaggerate. They force attention.

What matters is not whether you agree with the sculpture. It is whether you acknowledge its existence. Because when bronze statues start vomiting sewage on the South Bank and half the national press looks the other way, it tells you less about the sculpture and more about the plumbing of our national conversation.

Meanwhile, I finished my coffee, glanced out at the garden, and made a mental note to check the pond filter. At least there, when the water turns murky, you know exactly whose fault it is.