‘You’re polluting our water. 1100 criminal offences a day. You should be ashamed of yourself...’
Mr Bates vs The Post Office ably demonstrated that television still has the power to change the world. The outcry that greeted that show led to tangible change in society, but it also illustrated that there is a an appetite for issue led television. Dirty Business essentially tries to do the same thing for the UK’s sewage crisis that Mr Bates… did for the British Post Office scandal, and it does so brilliantly…
Ash Smith (David Thewlis), a former detective, and Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins), a retired professor of computational biology, discover that various water companies are dumping raw sewage into England’s rivers. Later, they go on to uncover that the Environment Agency are complicit.
Art doesn’t have to outrage to be powerful or to put a point across but it sure helps. And ‘outrage’ really is the only word that fits here. There were various moments throughout watching Dirty Business where I was genuinely outraged, appalled, incredulous… furious even. Like most people, I had a vague notion that there had been some kind of scandal within the water industry, I didn’t know the extent of it, however. I didn’t know that people had become very ill. I didn’t know about the outbreak of E-coli. I didn’t know about the catastrophic impact on the environment (particularly fish). And I definitely didn’t know that people had died as a result of the revolting and deliberate penny pinching on behalf of the water companies that allowed this to happen or the utterly spineless reaction from the Environment Agency. The sheer scale of their greed, incompetence and arrogance is breath-taking.
We live in a world where the relentless hunger for more and more profit is poisoning our water, forcing people to choose between heating their home or having enough food to eat. We live in a world where there are billionaires and food banks. This is, at once, preposterous, repulsive and genuinely depressing. How have we as a society allowed it to come to this? Anyway. Thewlis is great. Watkins is great. They share a great chemistry. The decision by writer-director Joseph Bullman to intercut the drama with real footage of sewage dumps is both powerful and incredibly effective. It’s fantastic television if nothing else.
All that being said, carrying an admirable message is not enough to make great art (see Don’t Look Up). Happily, Dirty Business is not only important television, it’s great television – essential viewing.
