One of our neighbours spent a large part of a recent Sunday afternoon hurling drawers from a wardrobe he wanted to dispose of into the trees opposite our home. Not for him the tedious business of popping down to the public dump in Tseung Kwan O, or even the option of leaving the offending white Formica furniture beside the nearby bins. He wanted his possessions to join the old fridge, the tumble dryer, the armchair, and other rubbish down among the bushes and trees. The sad thing is that this man is not an unusual, anti-social slob. He is merely doing the same as thousands of others like him, as tonight's episode of The Pearl Report (Pearl, 8pm) makes abundantly clear. Throughout Hong Kong, residents are more than happy to hurl their rubbish out of the window, rather than getting rid of it properly, even if their actions mean the view will be permanently disfigured. In Yuen Long, apparently, things have become so bad in one village that the fishpond there has been burning for months because the rubbish in it has caught alight, and the fire brigade cannot put the flames out. Meanwhile the villagers have to live with the toxic fumes belching out from the water. So who is to blame for all this? The Government comes in for some flak for not providing sufficient conveniently located public tips. But, somehow, I think, even if there was a landfill two minutes' drive from our village my neighbour would still have thought it too far to go. For some reason, the Loch Ness monster always seems to have inspired more laughter than terror. Of all the strange phenomena that have captured the public's imagination over the years, from the Yeti to the Bermuda Triangle, Nessie has been perhaps the most sneered at. Maybe it is partly the nickname that makes the beast seem slightly silly. But it was not until about five years ago that any major, cross-disciplinary investigation of the loch was organised by the Discovery Channel, and Yorkshire Television, and the Natural History Museum in London. Using the latest equipment, including two state-of-the-art marine research vessels, a team of investigators plumbed the depths. Their discoveries are revealed in tonight's documentary Loch Ness Discovered (World, 8.30pm). The programme includes a fascinating debate between three of the most media-friendly scientists in the business - Stephen Jay Gould, Sir David Attenborough, and Richard Dawkins - about whether or not the creature could possibly exist, as some kind of deep water throwback to an earlier age perhaps. The trio also discuss exactly what the creature of legend might be: a fish; an aquatic dinosaur. Or perhaps just a big scary monster that comes out only when unsuspecting fishermen have been knocking back a medicinal whisky or two.
