An opera-loving member of high society turned eco-activist was forced into police protection with a panic button around his neck. A Hollywood actor who recorded the activist’s life story as he was dying from exposure to the chemicals he was researching. Add in two investigative journalists who realize that not everything is as it seems, and then discover some surprising truths, and you have “podcasting’s strangest team” on Buried: The Last Witness.
On their award-winning 2023 podcast Buried, husband and wife team Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor delved into the illegal dumping of toxic waste in Britain and its links to organized crime. This time they focus on ‘forever chemicals’, specifically polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and try to discover whether one whistleblower may have been decades ahead of his time in reporting on their harmful impact.
“It’s amazing how big the scale of this story is,” says Ashby, as we sit backstage at the Crucible theatre, where they’re holding a live discussion as part of Sheffield DocFest. “With this series we not only want your blood to run cold, but also to make you question your own blood.”
It all started when Taylor and Ashby got a lead on the work of former farm representative Douglas Gowan. In 1967 he discovered a deformed calf in a field and began investigating strange animal occurrences near the Brofiscin and Maendy quarries in South Wales. He linked them to waste dumping by, among others, the nearby Monsanto chemical plant, which produced PCBs.
PCBs were used in products such as paint and paper to provide fire retardancy, but they were discovered to be harmful and have been banned in Britain since 1981. However, because of their inability to break down – hence the term “forever chemical” – Gowan predicted their legacy would be troubling. “I expect there will be a whole range of chronic diseases,” he said. He even claimed that his own exposure to PCBs (the result of years of testing on contaminated soils) caused his pancreas and immune system to malfunction. “I’m a mess and I think it can all be blamed on PCBs,” he said.
Gowan, however, was not a typical environmentalist. “A high-society Tory with blue blood and a trained lawyer who could beat anyone,” Taylor describes him in the series. He even borrowed helicopters from friends in high places to travel to survey farmers’ fields. Gowan died in 2018, but the couple managed to obtain his life’s work: confidential reports, tests and years of evidence. “I’m interested in environmental heroes who aren’t cliché,” says Ashby. “So I was fascinated by him. But then we started to see his flaws and had to really weigh them up. My goodness, it’s a dark world we’ve ended up in.”
The reason they were able to delve even deeper into this dark world is thanks to award-winning actor Michael Sheen who came across Gowan’s work in a story he read in 2017. He was so impressed by it and the lack of wider reporting that he tracked him down. “I got a message back from him saying, ‘Please come see me because I’m going to be dead soon,’” Sheen says. “I took a camera and spent a few days with him and just heard this extraordinary story.”
What Gowan had been trying to prove for years gained some attention in 2007, with pieces in the Ecoologist and an article in the Guardian examining how “Monsanto helped create one of the most polluted sites in Britain”. One was described as having “smelled sick when it rains and the stream that flows from it runs bright orange.” But then the momentum stalled.
Years later, in 2023, Ashby and Taylor came across a recording of Sheen delivering the 2017 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, which referenced Gowan and his work. Before they knew it, they were sitting in the actor’s kitchen drinking tea and learned that he had conducted a seven-hour lifetime interview with Gowan before his death. So they joined forces. Sheen isn’t just a token celebrity name added for influence on this podcast; he is invested. For him it is both personal and political. “Once you look into it, you realize there’s a pattern,” he says. “All the places where this seems to have happened are poor, working-class neighborhoods. There is a feeling that areas like the one I come from are being exploited.”
Sheen even visits some infected locations in the series because she feels sick. “That made it very real,” he says. “To look into a field and say, ‘Well, I’m pretty sure this is toxic waste.'” Sheen lived a double life of sorts. “I went to rehearsals for a play on Monday and people said, ‘What did you do this weekend?’” he says. ‘Oh, I’ve been to the most contaminated area in Britain and I think I may have been poisoned.’ People thought I was joking.” Sheen was ultimately fine, but did have some temporary headaches and nausea, which was concerning. “We literally had to find out if we had poisoned Michael Sheen,” says Ashby, who also ponders in the series: “Did I just kill a national treasure?”
The story gets even more complicated. Gowan’s findings prove accurate and prescient, but the story surrounding his journey becomes muddy. A character with a sense of drama, he turned his investigation into a juicy, compelling, action-packed story, which could not always be confirmed. “If he hadn’t done that, and if he had been a nerdy, analytical, detail-oriented person who just presented the scientific reports and filed them neatly, would we have created this podcast?” asks Taylor, a fascinating question that runs through this excellent and gripping series.
Ashby believes Gowan understood the importance of storytelling when it comes to cutting through the noise. “There is so much scientific research showing the scale of the problems we face, and yet we don’t seem to have the stories,” he says. ‘I think Douglas understood that. Essentially, he understood that stories motivate people to act. But then he went too far.”
However, this isn’t purely about Gowan’s story – it’s about evidence. The Last Witness is also a groundbreaking investigation into the long-term impact of PCBs. “We threw the kitchen sink at this,” Ashby says. “The breakthrough for us is that the Royal Society of Chemistry came on board and funded incredibly expensive tests. So we have an obligation to go after the truth in a way that is almost never done.”
From shop-bought fish so toxic it breaches official health advice to excessive levels of banned chemicals found in British soil, the results are staggering. “The scientist almost fell off his chair,” says Ashby. “That reading is the highest he has ever measured in the soil – in the world. That was the moment we knew Douglas was right and we now realize the magnitude of this problem. The public doesn’t realize that even a chemical that has been banned for 40 years is still actually present in our environment.”
To delve even further into the question of how far PCBs have entered our environment and our food chain, Ashby and Taylor had their own blood tested. When Taylor found 80 different types of toxic PCB chemicals in her blood, it was a sobering moment. “I was really emotional because it’s so personal,” she says. “It was the thought that this thing was inside me that was forbidden before I was even born, and the thought of passing that on to my children.” Ashby added: “We have managed physical risks in our lives as journalists in Tanzania and in organized crime, but this invisible threat to our health is more terrifying than a gangster.”
To gauge the extent of what overexposure to PCBs can do, they went to Anniston, Alabama, where a Monsanto factory once stood. “As a journalist you have a built-in skepticism and you think it can’t be that bad,” says Ashby. “But when I got there, I couldn’t believe what I saw. I hate to use words like dystopian, but it was. There is a very large school that cannot be used. There are childhood diseases and cancers. It was really the most powerful example of the worst example of these chemicals.”
These are gloomy things, but sowing fear and panic is not the intention. “Obviously we’re very concerned about that,” Ashby said. “And while the environmental crises we face feel overwhelming, it’s incredible how a movement has emerged and how individuals are taking action in communities. The lesson we can learn from Douglas is that the response does not have to be resignation. It could be an agency.”
• Buried: The Last Witness is now on BBC Radio 4.