Dirty Business creator on uncooked sewage scandal: ‘This is the worst possible situation we’ll settle for with out beginning a revolution’
The creator of Dirty Business, the campaigning Channel 4 drama that’s drawn comparisons to Mr Bates vs the Post Office, says he has been inundated with “furious” messages from Brits who feel powerless in light of the raw sewage scandal – and are calling for change.
Dirty Business, which airs its finale tonight, dramatises two Oxfordshire residents’ 10-year investigation into raw sewage contaminations by water companies in the UK.
The three-parter has been hailed as a five-star hit, with critics and viewers alike full of praise for its unflinching look at how faeces, condoms and dirty nappies made their way into England’s rivers and seas.
“The situation we have is just about the worst possible situation that we, the British people, will accept without there being some kind of revolution,” writer and director Joseph Bullman tells The Independent. “It’s just the worst imaginable thing, other than pouring s***e through our taps – so you hope there’s going to be some change.
“People feel impotent. They feel like whatever we say to our political class, we get the same policies, election after election, government after government. Everyone wants our system to be different, no one knows how to elect a government that’s going to change it.”
In the series, two middle-aged Cotswolds neighbours, biologist Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) and ex-copper Ash Smith (David Thewlis), begin investigating why the local wildlife have abandoned their increasingly browning River Windrush. While being fobbed off with countless emails from dismissive Environment Agency representatives – who are meant to be regulating the water companies – they discover via whistleblowers that water companies have been illegally pumping vast amounts of raw sewage into the waterways.
Bullman was fresh from creating Channel 4’s Partygate – a satirical take on the political scandal under Boris Johnson’s leadership – when he stumbled upon an article on the privatisation of British water suppliers. As explored in the show, Thames Water was owned by Australian bank Macquarie before being sold to Canadian pension fund OMERS and the Kuwait Investment Authority in 2017.
“I thought to myself, surely there’s some kind of story there, and I very quickly realised that all our water companies are owned by overseas investment banks or private asset management firms,” he says.
He worked on the project for two years, but used the decade-long research of campaigners Smith and Hammond as the basis for the films. “They’re national heroes, Ash and Peter, and should become knights of the realm because they have worked for 10 years to bring this to the attention of everyone,” he says.
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For Bullman, factual dramas are vital to raising awareness of scandals like these. “When you do something that strikes a chord with people’s lived experiences, you get a response that resonates in a way that you don’t get with a lot of conventional dramas,” he says.
“I feel a swelling up of anger on this and people connect to it because it’s about something they can see in their own lives.
“There’s some good drama made in this country but a lot of it feels very homogenised and made with the international streaming market in mind – lots of serial killers, strong female detectives, missing children. I think that feels a bit remote for people.”
One particularly harrowing scene in Dirty Business sees the parents of eight-year-old Heather Preen cling onto her lifeless body after she’s infected with e-coli, two weeks after falling into a pool of allegedly contaminated water on a Devon beach. A jury returned a verdict of misadventure during an inquest into her 1999 death, with South West Water and the Environment Agency denying responsibility.
With tragic stories like these being portrayed throughout the series, Bullman wanted to bring some humour and levity to other parts of the investigation – and some of the Environment Agency’s responses were prime comedy material.
“Looking at Dirty Business and the water industry, it’s such an incredibly Byzantine, complex story and some stuff is funny. I thought, ‘Can I ask audiences for three hours to watch this ecocide, where they’re killing everything that lives in the rivers and putting people’s lives at risk?’ Why make it relentlessly bleak because that’s not what life is like?
“Episode three gets inside the Environment Agency and the policies that they’ve implemented are so farcical. At one stage, they took cars off of the employees inside the agency who investigate the sewage works because they said they were trying to turn the needle on climate change, so they had no way to drive to the rivers and coasts to look into it.”
Last year, several water companies were handed large fines over wastewater treatment failures, with South West Water agreeing to pay £24m, while Thames Water was hit with a record £104m fine by Ofwat in May over environmental breaches involving sewage spills.
However, Bullman is hoping that water regulation will go even further.
“The Environment Agency for many years has been operating a policy called operator self-monitoring, which means they invite the water companies to regulate themselves,” he says. “The agency has been defanged and gone on to do the bidding of the water companies – that has to end. We need a real regulator.
“No water company executive has ever been prosecuted, no water company owner, board member or investor has ever gone to prison,” he adds. “What we need in the first instance is for our laws to be enforced.
“Boris Johnson’s government and this government said they were going to introduce tough legal sanctions but they’ve existed for decades now and they’ve never been enforced. We need the regulation to be taken seriously.”
A spokesperson for the Environment Agency told The Independent that their “sympathies are with the family of Heather Preen” and that the show raises “important issues about water quality, the actions of water companies and regulation of the sector over recent decades”.
“Our priority is always to protect the environment for people and wildlife, and the organisation has undergone significant changes in recent years to better tackle water pollution,” they said. “More people, better data and increased powers mean we will always act on intelligence of potential offences.
“This year we are on track to do 10,000 inspections of water company assets, rooting out wrongdoing and driving better performance. Since 2015 we have concluded 69 prosecutions against water and sewerage companies securing fines of over £153m.”
