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REVIEW
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
This docudrama about illegal sewage dumping by greedy water companies is great TV that will spark a national conversation
This harrowing factual drama about the illegal pollution of England's waterways is already important. You can't blame the makers for scrapping their crude working title – ‘Isle of Shite’ (ahem) – but ‘Dirty Business’ almost feels too tame. Writer-director Joseph Bullman, who's previously made powerful TV dramas about far-right radicalisation (2019's The Left Behind) and inhumane working conditions (2022's Life and Death in the Warehouse), has illuminated a national scandal that’s absolutely filthy in all senses. Since the water industry was privatised in 1989, a combination of corporate greed and ineffectual regulation by the Environment Agency has turned unlawful sewage dumping into standard practice. Why has this been allowed to happen? Because it's cheaper than getting water companies to clean up their act by investing in new infrastructure.
Comparisons to 2024's Mr Bates vs The Post Office are inevitable and not unwarranted: if Dirty Business stokes up half as much public indignation, it will have done its job. But where Mr Bates was a fairly conventional ITV drama in form and tone, this is more documentary-like.
Smartly, Bullman weaves in real-life footage of raw sewage being pumped into England's rivers and seas, which is often stomach-churning to watch. His taut three-parter is built around the remarkable real-life campaigning of WASP (Windrush Against Sewage Pollution), a grassroots group founded in 2016 by retired detective Ash Smith (David Thewlis) and retired professor Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) after their local river, the Windrush, slowly turns brown. In time, the malpractice they uncover turns out to stretch far wider than the Cotswolds.
The sheer scale of the problem is shocking
Throughout, we spool back to 1999, when eight-year-old Heather Preen (Madison Waterworth) contracts a fatal case of E. coli poisoning after playing on a Devon beach. It's surely no spoiler to note that South West Water, which has been spewing sewage into this section of coastline, does everything possible to deny responsibility. Posy Sterling is heartbreaking as the girl's grieving mother, Julie, who picked the beach in question because it had a Blue Flag cleanliness award that turned out to be meaningless. One of Bullman’s masterstrokes is casting actors with serious comedy chops – Getting On's Vicki Pepperdine, Ghosts’ Charlotte Ritchie – as the bumbling, obfuscating execs who acquiesce to what is going on. It's a subtle way of showing us that the rot is endemic and perpetuated by corporate clowning across the board.
And honestly, the sheer scale of the problem is shocking. In 2024, the year of the most recent report, sewage was dumped into UK waterways at least 585,000 times – that's once every 54 seconds. But in contrast to Mr Bates vs The Post Office, there’s no sense of resolution at the end of this series. WASP and other grassroots groups including ‘Surfers Against Sewage’ are still working to bring the water companies and their toothless regulators to account. A bolder Labour government than the current one could probably use this series as a springboard to re-nationalise the entire industry: a hard reset it's corrupted enough to need.
For now, let's hope Dirty Business turns a steady stream of public disgust into a frothing wave that can't be ignored.
All three episodes are streaming on Channel 4 On Demand now.