Joe Lycett comes clean about his toilet stunt

All a ruse to highlight sewage dumping

If you thought there was a whiff of bullshit around Joe Lycett’s toilet stunt this week… turns out you were absolutely right.

The comic has revealed that the launch event for his new podcast – which apparently ended with sewage leaking into Liverpool’s Albert Dock – was all a stunt to highlight the issue of water companies dumping waste into Britain’s waterways.

Lycett had set up a pop-up toilet – aka the Turdis – inviting fans to come down and share their most embarrassing loo-based stories for his new Turdcast podcast, which featured Gary Linker as its first guest.

Lycett on his popup toilet

But as the stand-up – and veteran prankster – revealed in a new video, it was all a sham.

Claiming to be Miss Sue Idge, he said: ‘You might have seen those little incident in Liverpool on Thursday. So what I like to do is let's do big stunts that get people talking about the big issues. And sometimes those stunts go to plan and sometimes they absolutely don't.

'Well, on this occasion, everything went exactly to plan. Of course, I didn't spill raw sewage into the Royal Albert Dock. I'm not spilling sjot in public everywhere. Who do you think I am? GB News?

‘No, it was fake sewage from a fake toilet to promote the fake podcast. Turdcast was never real. Although we did record a real one with the real Gary Lineker would have been better to use a fake Gary Lineker as we would have saved a lot of money on his day race.

‘So why did I spill fake sewage, other than because I'm desperate for attention, and Instagram likes?

‘Well, I spilled fake surged to get people talking about the real sewage which is being spilled every year in the billions of litres by our water companies.

‘Last year, according to one analysis, £1.4billion in dividends was paid out to shareholders of the water companies. That's a lot of money that could be used to improve the sewage network and reduce spills.

‘So I want the water companies to stop paying dividends and invest that money in improving and solving this problem. So if you agree, you can go onto a website and send an email to your water company asking them to sign up to what we're calling Joe's Poo Promise.’

Click here to send that email.

And here is the trailer for that podcast that never was:

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Published: 26 Nov 2023