Dirty Business review – a fist in the face over Britain’s sewage scandal
Joseph Bullman’s drama-documentary mounts an unanswerable case in what the piece calls a dirty business of sewage pollution: a controlled‑fury television drama that follows amateur sleuths, a bereaved family and a series of regulatory failures, and which aims to intensify public disgust and force official attitudes to change.
Dirty Business: a dramatised investigation that wants to move the needle
The central strand follows two recently retired neighbours in the Cotswolds in 2016 who notice brown murk in the River Windrush and decide to investigate. One of them, Ashley Smith, is played by David Thewlis and is depicted as a former "Line of Duty" cop who specialised in investigating corrupt officers. The other, Peter Hammond, played by Jason Watkins, is presented as an Oxford maths professor. Their combined talents — Ash’s instinct for dishonesty and Peter’s algorithmic work to find patterns in confusing data — are shown building a picture of infrastructure damaged by three decades of underinvestment and thousands of instances of rivers and seas tainted by untreated sewage.
How two neighbours followed the thread of sewage dumping
The drama shows the pair challenging an explanation offered by a privatised local water company, finding that the official line does not add up. Real footage shot by campaigners is woven into the drama to underline the scale of the environmental damage. The storytelling mixes banter — often comic and disquieting — with investigative persistence; the 2016 scenes are described as both funny and furious as the characters dig in.
The Preens’ story — a Blue Flag holiday that ended in tragedy
A second timeline begins in 1999 and follows Mark and Julie Preen, played by Tom McKay and Posy Sterling, who take their two daughters to Dawlish in Devon because the beach carries Blue Flag status, indicating cleanliness. They find effluent pumping from a pipe on the shore. Eight‑year‑old Heather steps in the contaminated water and, within two weeks, dies from E coli O157 poisoning. The ultimate cause of the outbreak is not identified in the provided context; a jury returned a verdict of misadventure. The coroner’s recommendations included tertiary treatment of all sewage in the area to make it pathogen‑free, and a summertime ban on dogs on the beach.
Regulatory failings and the third strand in 2008 Environment Agency offices
A third narrative thread shifts scenes to the offices of the Environment Agency in 2008 as the two investigators realise the problem is as much regulatory as corporate. The drama uses comedy as a weapon: corporate statements are staged as supercilious evasions read direct to camera by actors playing executives. A change is shown as being announced towards the end of the Labour administration; the drama presents that the effects of that change were greatly worsened by David Cameron’s later drive to cut spending and slash regulation in the 2010s. The phrase "operational self‑monitoring" is used to indicate a policy shift that moves the burden of identifying potential breaches of environmental law from the Environment Agency — what follows in the provided context is unclear in the provided context.
End the sewage pollution scandal: why the drama is framed as a call to action
One of the supplied headlines bluntly demands: End the sewage pollution scandal. That framing is mirrored in the drama’s forceful tone: scenes of horror for the Preens are drawn with devastating starkness while the investigative timeline is a fist in the face. The narrative posture positions the programme as part investigation, part outrage, and part public pleading for change.
Campaign echo and coverage notes
The contextual material also includes a campaign titled "End the sewage pollution scandal" that is identified as promoted by a campaigning organisation using the registered office 10 Queen Street Place, First Floor, EC4R 1BE, London, with registered company number 06642193 in England and Wales. Separate headline material describes the series as "brutal and brilliant"; full text for that headline is unclear in the provided context.
Dirty Business joints searing personal tragedy with procedural sleuthing and satirical takes on corporate and regulatory language. Whether the drama will shift public opinion or policy is left as an implication in the narrative; the presentation emphasises systemic failure, human cost and the need for remedial action. The programme’s blend of comic anger, archival campaign footage and dramatized investigation is presented as designed to make viewers see the scale and moral weight of the sewage contamination problem.
Note: some contextual details are incomplete or cut off in the provided context and are described here as unclear in the provided context rather than being guessed.
