Under the spotlight

Edmund Trebus, an eccentric 80-yearold Polish émigré, captured the public imagination after his appearances in A Life of Grime 10 years ago. His battles with Haringey’s environmental health team catapulted him to reality TV stardom even before the first Big Brother housemates started to crowd the newspaper gossip columns.

His popularity wasn’t just down to his quixotic refusal to clear up the rat-infested junk he had accumulated in his house and garden. A key element of the programme’s success was the notion of environmental health itself.

In the following decade the profession has become a staple for prime-time schedules, with series such as The Rat Pack, Dishing the Dirt, Grime Fighters and Rogue Restaurants regularly pulling in the viewers. EHOs have become as much a part of television history as doctors, cops and chefs.

Phil Keighley, senior EHO at Waltham Forest LBC, helped create that history when he and colleague Pip Broad starred in two episodes of Dishing the Dirt screened last month. They were filmed issuing an emergency prohibition notice on a food premises after discovering a large number of rodent droppings – the kind of story viewers lap up. Twelve food safety inspections were filmed over three weeks, with just a few of the most interesting making it on screen.

Council publicity

The council was keen for publicity after being approached by the production company, ITV Studios, and Phil volunteered to go in front of the cameras. “I can’t say it was an ambition, but I did do a similar thing a few years ago called Food Police, which was on the BBC,” he says. “I wasn’t nervous until the day of the initial filming for the first few minutes or so, just to get used to everybody. Once that was done, it was OK.

“I started to enjoy it after that first meeting with the crew, they were very friendly and easy to get on with. They became part of the team and we didn’t notice them that much.”

Building trust with ITV Studios was an important consideration for the council’s media department, which was concerned that the environmental health team’s work was accurately portrayed and not sensationalised in the editing process.

Phil was also worried about putting his foot in it in front of an audience of about 1.2 million. “You don’t want to make an idiot of yourself, but we’ve been doing the job for so long it wasn’t much of an issue,” he says. “They’d film a section and then they’d want us to talk about what they’d seen and what it means and what the risk is. They weren’t really trying to probe us for anything exciting or outrageous.

“Later on they took us in a room at a town hall and sat us on a chair with lights and cameras on us for a face-to-face interview. That was a bit more nerve-wracking than anything else we did.”

It is perhaps surprising that even though businesses can legitimately refuse entry to a camera crew, none of those visited by Phil and Pip did so. “No-one objected,” says Phil. “Their reaction to us is what we always get, but I suppose the fact that they were being filmed must have affected them.

“But we were obviously careful about what we said about the history of the premises we visited when discussing inspections with the presenters. I think as a profession we come over pretty well, actually. The people I’ve spoken to who aren’t from environmental health have had a good reaction to it. It reminds people what does go on behind the scenes, behind the kitchen door.”

Despite the time taken up filming, and a few good-humoured jokes going round his department after his moment in the spotlight, Phil would be happy to do it again.

Environmental health is benefiting from media interest, but some people have argued that the public’s perception is being skewed by a onesided view of the profession. A Life of Grime has been singled out for deterring potential students by depicting only “rat-catchers and mortuaries”.

A 2007 study by the Department of Public Health Sciences at Kings College London found that 15 per cent of students studying on courses accredited by the UK Environmental Health Registration Board first heard about environmental health through just that sort of programme.

Jenny Morris, CIEH principal policy officer, is aware of these concerns. She thinks the profile of environmental health can benefit from a good relationship with the media, but knows that TV shows are about entertainment. She is careful only to work with directors who want to report on the ins-and-outs of how EHOs operate rather than just the “shock, horror” of a dirty kitchen.

One of her jobs is to liaise with production companies and vet their programme ideas before putting out a call on CIEH’s EHC Net to ask local authorities if they want to be involved. She has also advised programmes such as EastEnders with storylines featuring EHOs and appears regularly on TV, radio and in newspapers. Although Jenny now feels at home in front of a camera, it wasn’t always like that.

“The first time I did it I was absolutely petrified,” she confesses. “It was a bit of a challenge because I had only been here for a short time. We had launched a campaign around licensing and prior approval. The media picked it up and it became a big issue, so I was invited onto the lunchtime news to be interviewed by Anna Ford. Bear in mind I’d never done this before and I was thinking, ‘Hmm, I don’t know if I can do this’. The worst bit was sitting in the green room – while you’re waiting they’re trying to reassure you, saying it’s not a big audience, only about six million. I also learned to take off the make-up before leaving the studio, because otherwise you go out on the streets looking like a clown.”

Her most recent appearance was on the One Show. “I did a pre-recorded spot on illegal meat. Like a lot of these things you spend a lot of time pre-recording a lot of material, then they decide what they want, edit it and put it together,” she recalls. “I was on it for about two minutes, yet we had spent more than two hours filming. To me that’s another issue – you’ve got two different challenges between doing things recorded and doing things live. In a way, it’s easier if it’s recorded because if you get it wrong you can have another go, but you have no control about what goes out. If you do it live then what you say goes, but the adrenalin pumps a lot harder.”

Jenny has strict criteria about whether or not to get involved and has turned down Dishing the Dirt and Rogue Restaurants after being asked to appear with the presenters to discuss the filmed inspections. She thought it would be unfair to comment on the performance of the EHOs without first having seen the whole inspection, rather than just a few clips.

“I have also turned down various programmes which are not as nearly as serious as that,” she says. “They’re more like the ‘road crash’ type of discussion programmes – some of the daytime television stuff. What I thought was really good was a recent You and Yours series on radio. They are more interested in getting to the issues and I did two programmes speaking about E. coli 0157.”

Engaging with the media has helped spread the word about environmental health. For instance, many celebrity chefs used to show poor hygiene practices on screen, such as using the same chopping board for meat and vegetables, until the CIEH got involved. “It is improving,” says Jenny. “Gordon Ramsey has torn people apart on television about hygiene, and more recently on Masterchef one of the contestants was eliminated because of cross-contamination.”

Uphill battle

But while showing EHOs dealing with rats, cleaning up drug dens and busting filthy restaurants continues to be popular, why is the other key strand of environmental health – health and safety – so vilified in the press? Scare stories about the “nanny state” and “elf’n’safety fascists” are all far too common, particularly in papers such as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

Judith Hackitt, chair of the Health and Safety Executive, says she is facing an uphill battle. “It’s a constant drip, drip, drip of these stories that is so damaging,” she continues. “I’m hard pressed to say which has been the worst example because there are so many. The one everybody talks about is the banning of conkers, which all happened because one schoolteacher actually tried to make a point that we shouldn’t be so risk-averse. Of course it all got turned into a story that the authorities – whoever they may be – have banned conkers, when that was not the case at all.”

The HSE has tried to deal with this adverse publicity with initiatives such as the Myth of the Week section on its website, but Judith doesn’t want to get into a full-scale war with the papers.

“I’ve been very careful not to blame the media, as such, because there’s absolutely no doubt that in most cases there is a grain of truth,” she says. “I don’t want them to stop reporting the stories, I want them to report the real cause, not simply use this lazy ‘health and safety gone mad’ language. It’s people using health and safety as an excuse for their own risk aversion that’s the real problem.”

Judith appreciates the potential of new media such as YouTube and Twitter in popularising health and safety. One video clip that made its way around the internet was of an employee “surfing” on the back of a waste truck. The HSE received good coverage after being contacted for a reaction when the incident was broadcast on a local TV station. An example of “health and safety gone sane”, maybe?

“We are being proactive,” she says. “I’m even on YouTube myself in a clip showing me front of a classroom demonstrating the ‘flaming hands’ experiment to show how science experiments can be both fun and safe.

“You don’t get effective workplace health and safety by rules and regulations and paperwork, you get it by winning people’s hearts and minds that there are real risks out there that they need to take care about.

“The last thing you need is all this cynical stuff in the press playing to the sceptics who come in to the workplace saying ‘all this health and safety stuff is rubbish’.”

The public’s appetite for environmental health shows no sign of abating. If the profession is to continue to uphold its good name, EHOs will need to carry on facing the glare of the spotlight.

Fictional EHP s in films, tv and literature

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

This 1970s remake of a classic horror movie stars Donald Sutherland as a San Francisco EHO who uncovers not just an unhygienic kitchen, but also a plot to take over the world. The film starts with Sutherland clashing with restaurant staff, an analogy of his subsequent battle against an alien species of plant that replicates and replaces human beings. Sutherland doesn’t have an easy time of it, and his car is vandalised by a couple of disgruntled chefs before he finds that more and more of his friends are being taken over by the aliens. Although the restaurant escapes closure for its code violations, humanity is heading for a far grimmer fate by the end of the film.

EHO scene Setting: the kitchen of a swanky San Francisco restaurant.

Donald Sutherland: “You don’t have any secrets from the Department of Health, Henri... [picks up something out of a bubbling pot with a pair of
forceps] “What is that?” Chef: “A caper...” Donald Sutherland: “... Nope, it’s a rat turd... If it’s a caper, eat it.”

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector

The tagline to this– Bond, Bullitt, Dirty Harry, now action has a new name – should tell you all you need to know. Filmed in the grand tradition of the Hollywood knockabout farce, along with such moneyspinning blockbusters as Big Momma’s House and Big Momma’s House 2, Larry the cable guy stars as a health inspector who takes a break from his usual inspection routine of downbeat greasy spoon diners to investigate a series of mysterious food poisonings at the city’s most expensive restaurants. Needless to say, he has a rookie partner who plays by the book and he eventually wins the day by making use of unorthodox methods.

EHO scene Setting: an inspection of a sushi restaurant

Larry: “This fish is raw! Are you trying to poison these folks in here?”

Fawlty Towers – Basil the Rat

“Ees not a rat, ees a Siberian hamster,” is one of the more enduring quotes from what is widely regarded as the best sitcom ever. The hamster is indeed really a rat, bought as a pet by Manuel, the long-suffering waiter. Basil thinks he has managed to hide the rodent from the visiting health inspector, until he unwittingly offers it to him after it turns up in a tin of biscuits. Basil handles the situation well by asking: “Would you care for a
rat?”

EHO scene: Setting: the Fawlty Towers hotel Mr Carnegie (the inspector): “...inadequate temperature control and storage of dangerous foodstuffs, storage of cooked and raw meat in same trays, storage of raw meat above confectionery with consequent dripping of meat juices onto cream products, refrigerator seals loose and cracked, ice box undefrosted, and refrigerator overstocked... “ Basil Fawlty: “Say no more.” Mr. Carnegie: “... food handling routines suspect, evidence of smoking in food preparation area, dirty and grubby food handling overalls, lack of wash hand basin which you gave us a verbal assurance you’ll have installed at our last visit six months ago and two dead pigeons in the water tank.” Fawlty: “Otherwise OK?”

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

Author Irvine Welsh gained notoriety after the film of his book Trainspotting, a violent drug-fuelled tale of life in 1980s Edinburgh, was released in 1996. Bedroom Secrets, set in the same city, shares many of the same themes. This time, however, the protagonists are two EHOs – the alcoholic football hooligan Danny Skinner and Star Trek fan Brian Kibby. Perhaps the most uncompromising portrayal of environmental health ever, and one that very few EHOs are likely to recognise.

EHO scene:

Setting: the offices of Edinburgh City Council’s environmental health department. “I did the inspection Tuesday morning, Bob,” Skinner said, then stressed, “You know that I would never go on to any site with a drink in me. I just had paperwork to catch up with this affie so I indulged myself with two pints of lager,” Skinner yawned, “and I have to admit that the second one was a mistake.”