Michael Sheen’s new show Buried gave him “constant paranoia” as he investigated “huge injustice”

Whilst conducting the investigation across Wales and the rest of the UK, Michael shared that he felt constant paranoia over the ‘scary’ chemicals that were found in the ground

A compelling two-part unscripted series fronted by acclaimed Welsh actor Michael Sheen will soon be coming to our screens. Buried with Michael Sheen delves into claims of chemical contamination throughout his native Wales, exposing a scandal with potentially devastating consequences across the UK.

For Michael, the issue hits close to home after he encountered farming consultant and whistle blower Douglas Gowan nearly a decade ago, where he claimed that the people of Wales had been poisoned, not through a single criminal act, but through prolonged exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment.

Douglas believed thousands of tonnes of toxic industrial chemicals known as Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) had been disposed of at locations throughout Wales and north west England. Frequently called the “godfather of forever chemicals”, PCBs were considered a wonder chemical in the 1960s owing to their resistance to degradation, but are now officially classified as a Group 1 carcinogen and banned globally.

The whistle blower dedicated over 50 years attempting to alert people to the dangers of the chemical dumping, yet seemingly nobody would pay attention. Unable to abandon the story, Michael traced Douglas down and spent two days recording an interview with him.

Douglas recounted a lifetime of challenging corporations, government and local councils, alleging Monsanto – the world’s leading PCB producer – knowingly buried highly toxic waste in communities throughout Wales, with repercussions still being experienced today. Two months following that interview, Douglas passed away, leaving Michael with his story.

Speaking passionately on a Q&A panel ahead of the show’s airing on August 17, the Welsh actor explained that he first came across Douglas Gowan story randomly when he was living in Los Angeles.

He said: “I was scrolling down a Wikipedia page and there was one tiny sentence about environmental controversy that mentioned Brofiscin Quarry in south Wales. So I looked up Brofiscin Quarry and ended down a rabbit hole and eventually found this man called Douglas Gowan and the beginnings of his story, and I was completely intrigued.

“So I decided that I would try and find out if he was still alive, and he was. I got in touch with him and he said, ‘Come and see me. Come quickly because I might not be around much longer.’ So I went down to see him with my mate, Julian, and we filmed him for two days and got the story.

“And as I say in the film, within two months he was dead.”

After Douglas has passed away, the pair weren’t sure what to do with the information and interviews they gathered, but Michael “felt like it was down to me in that moment. I didn’t know that anyone else was doing anything about it.”

He said: “There were two bits of my brain working. One bit was going; this is a great drama, Douglas Gowan getting a phone call, turning up as a junior guy for the farmer’s union and investigating this farm, and then the story just reveals itself and that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But then the other part of my brain was going, if he’s right, people might be in danger. Something has to be done about this now, and as we know, dramas can take a while.

“So the first point I could do something about it in 2016 was when I was asked to do the Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture. In that I mentioned Douglas Gowan and his story, and I brought up the dangers of living in a post-industrial area, desperate for employment, desperate for work, for people, and the danger in how that can lead to people maybe being a bit lax around dangers to the community and to health.

“I mentioned Douglas Gowan and the story of Monsanto hoping that someone might hear that and then say, oh, we should investigate this further. Which they did… but it took seven or eight years for it to happen.”

Investigative journalists Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor, were also looking in to the environmental issues that Douglas had uncovered after a friend of his shared all of his research with the pair. Lucy said: “We did a previous podcast which was about waste, and after that somebody sent us an email saying my friend has Douglas died, but you should look at what he was doing.

“We somehow ended up inheriting all of his documents; CDs, DVDs of his, his documents, test results, diaries, just loads and loads of stuff. And I think from that moment we knew that it was a story we had to do because there was so much here and it dated back so far.

But it was when they discovered Michael’s connection to the issue that their work went into hyperspeed. “We came across this speech that Michael had made and we didn’t know at the time there was any tape, we didn’t know he had interviewed Douglas. But we contacted Michael and were surprised when he said, ‘Yeah, come see me. I know all about this.’ So then to have Michael to tell us about Douglas and see Douglas on the videos, that completely transformed what we were doing. It was amazing.”

Whilst digging in to the various environmental concerns across Wales and the rest of the UK, Michael shared that he felt constant paranoia over the scary chemicals that were found in the ground during their investigation. He said: “The whole point of us making this is to push for something to happen. This isn’t just for its own sake, so it’s unravelling and unfolding in real time and yes, because of the chaotic nature of Douglas’ evidence, we – Dan and Lucy – were finding things, and letting me know about them in real time.

“It makes you feel all the more responsibility, because I can’t speak for Dan and Lucy, but I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m an actor and this is really important. Hopefully this allows people to be heard and seen and to bring them together, so that they’re connected, they don’t feel like they’re on their own, and they’re not fighting this on their own.

“There was a moment when we’d been to Brofiscin, and I’d been in the field and I hadn’t been wearing the wellies at that point. I was wearing my own boots, and I remember going back in my car and stopping at the garage to get petrol and then taking my boots off and hosing them down in the garage because I got so paranoid that I might be taking this home. There’s moments like that where it is really daunting. It is scary.”

Michael also outlined what he hopes will come from doing the documentary, and that he wishes that it will go further as “the people who are responsible don’t exist anymore.”

The actor said: “I think it’s important to say that the biggest injustice here is that the people who are responsible for this have got away with not having to take responsibility. That’s the first thing. The people who dump this stuff should be made responsible, but what happens is the company mutates into a different company and a different company and suddenly the people who are responsible don’t exist anymore.

“The next thing, in my opinion, is that local councils – where this potentially contaminated land is – are terrified that if they’re financially responsible for doing something about this, that it will bankrupt them. Because they don’t have the budgets available.

“Somehow we have to make sure that we are able to move past that point because people like the two Jans who have been fighting for years to try and get their concerns taken seriously and the concerns of their community are being pushed back, and at times they’re potentially being sold disinformation about what’s going on.

“We have to somehow make sure that the councils themselves, understandably, when they don’t have the budgets to deal with this, that they are not held responsible for it, but they are held responsible for not doing anything about it. So then what that means is you have to go beyond the councils. You go to Welsh Government, you go to the UK Government, you go international. This is beyond our country. There has to be a pool of resources in the absence of the people responsible for it.

“We have to find some international response to this in order to take the pressure off the small communities and the individuals who are here who are giving their life to this. It can’t be on them. So personally that would be my push, to say we have to go bigger, beyond the councils and find a way to show that the actual responsibility for this lies with people who have managed to avoid being made accountable.”

Eastman Chemical Company, responsible for Monsanto’s legacy production in the UK, did not respond to BBC’s request for comment.

Caerphilly Council and Wrexham Council stated to the BBC that the results of their investigations mean the sites do not meet the legal definition of ‘contaminated land’.

Cheshire Council told BBC that they are investigating and assessing whether the site in question meet the legal definition of ‘contaminated land’.

Natural Resources Wales, the environmental regulator responsible for testing at officially ‘contaminated’ sites, said to the BBC that previous investigations following PCB leaks at the disused Brofiscin Quarry found that they did not pose enough of a risk to warrant further action.