n February, an episode of Richard Osman’s House of Games featured the following question: in the UK, how many plastic bottles does the average person use in a year? The show’s guests were stumped. “There are some people who might have three a day,” mused Josie Long. “But then I was thinking: children and nans, hardly any.” In the end, the answer was 150, a full 20 more than Long’s best guess. “Feels like that number will go down as the years go by,” intoned Osman.
This was exactly the intended consequence. Because, in a very small way, the House of Games question was designed to help save the world. In January 2021,director general Tim Davie announced a plan to make the entire corporation drastically reduce the amount of carbon it produced, to the point where it would be net zero by 2030.
, equivalent to the total annual consumption of two households. And that’s across all genres. If you’re making a drama, quadruple that figure.Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian Albert’s communications manager, Genevieve Margrett, was involved right at the start, and remembers how much resistance she received from production teams at the time. “Back in 2011 there was a lot of goodwill, a lot of interest in it,” she says. “But, equally, a lot of production managers just looked at me, horrified. They were a bit like: ‘What? Share our footprint when we’ve got so much on? We’re already running at full speed!’ It was not particularly well received.