Dirty Business (Channel 4)
For corporate villains and utility company shysters with something to hide, there’s only one thing more bothersome than a retired gent on a mission. And that’s two retired gents.
David Thewlis and Jason Watkins play a pair of crusading friends in an Oxfordshire village, in Dirty Business, based on a true story. What begins as a moan in the pub becomes a national campaign to expose how raw sewage is being pumped into Britain’s rivers and coastal waters on a massive scale.
It helps that the duo have exactly the skills necessary to uncover this travesty. Ashley Smith (Thewlis) is an ex-detective who investigated police corruption, the real-life version of Line Of Duty‘s AC-12.
He’s dogged, unflappable and sceptical about everything he’s told, especially by smiling executives with long job titles.
Professor Peter Hammond is a former Oxford academic with a genius for spotting patterns in reams of numbers, which proves useful when requests for information are answered with a murky deluge of data. There’s gallons of jargon, too, which writer and director Joseph Bullman helpfully glosses for us with captions.
‘Untreated effluent discharges’, for instance, is industry code for human waste simply being dumped into waterways. ‘Operator self-monitoring’ means letting firms get away with it.
At first, water company PR people claim these incidents are unfortunate but rare occurrences, caused by heavy rainfall. But as the crusaders proceed, cautiously and politely, they realise that’s not even slightly true.
‘These aren’t accidents, it’s a policy,’ the professor says.
Pictured (L-R): Peter (Jason Watkins) and Ash (David Thewlis)
It’s impossible to watch this drama without feeling sick with anger at it all
‘This is starting to look like organised crime,’ his friend retorts.
Programme-makers usually leave the right-of-reply statements till the end, but in Dirty Business, the denials and justifications pop up regularly on the screen — a measure of how determined the water companies are to minimise the damage.
Even the preview copy I received came with yelps of indignation from Thames Water, about how they ‘work proactively and constructively with community groups’, blah blah, and trumpeting ‘the biggest upgrade of our network for 150 years’.
Since this show depicts their pumping stations as decaying Victorian relics, that’s not saying much.
This three-part story has overtones of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama that made millions fully aware of the Horizon scandal. Like that series, this one celebrates the decency and determination of average Englishmen with their blood up.
But a bitterly sad story is also laced through it. In flashbacks, we meet a family on holiday in Devon, where the eight-year-old daughter contracts an E. coli virus from sewage gushing onto the beach.
Her lingering death, and the disbelieving grief of her parents, are far more upsetting than even the most graphic footage of polluted rivers. It’s impossible to watch this drama without feeling sick with anger at it all.