Dirty Business hasn’t yet caused the firestorm that Mr Bates Vs The Post Office did two years ago, but writer/director Joseph Bullman has been flattered by the comparison.
‘When you make these kinds of shows, you’re trying to give the campaigners and the people at the coalface – in this case, at the river banks and on the coast – a voice,’ Bullman told Metro.
‘Mr Bates did that, and hopefully we’ve done that as well. I’m really proud of the comparison.’
He then added, with a jovial tone: ‘I mean, it’s annoying, because we think we’re really original and everyone’s saying it’s like Mr Bates, but it’s really a nice comparison.’
If anything, you might have expected his Channel 4 docudrama to be an even heavier sledgehammer to the news agenda. The three-parter investigates a scandal that impacts all of us: England’s water companies polluting our rivers and beaches while lining their own pockets.
The numbers are astounding. An average of over 1,600 raw sewage dumps – politely watered down in terminology as ‘spills’ – every day. Campaigners think it could have been as many as a million in 2024, when data was last reported.
Yet, water company shareholders were paid £1billion in dividends from 2023 to 2024, all while accruing debt to afford it. The actual infrastructure has been left to rot. And no executives have ever been prosecuted.
Since Marget Thatcher privatised the water industry, much of it has fallen under the stewardship of private hedge funds. This detail in an article was what first caught Bullman’s attention.
He read of Australian investment bank Macquarie’s ownership of Thames Water. ‘I remember thinking, what? Sorry, one of our water companies is owned by an investment bank from overseas?’ Looking into it, he learned Thames Water wasn’t the only one.
‘All of them have been endlessly flipped, bought and sold, extracted of value, they’ve become financial instruments,’ said Bullman, who was also behind 2023’s Partygate docudrama. The idea here was to connect the dots between the financial story and the on-the-water dumping of sewage.
‘I think we are standing on the brink of what may become the biggest corporate scandal in our history,’ Bullman said.
‘The damage they’ve done is so huge. They’ve committed an ecocide and they are causing lifelong suffering to people who’ve made the mistake of going in the water while they’re dumping.’
That heartbreaking part of the drama is anchored around Heather Preen, 8, who died of E. coli poisoning two weeks after playing on a beach in Devon while on holiday with her family in 1999.
The true story then picks up years later, with the crusading retirees Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) and Ashley Smith (David Thewlis), who embarked on a campaign to clean up their local River Windrush, which then morphed into a battle with the Environment Agency’s dereliction of duty in regulating the water companies.
We are standing on the brink of what may become the biggest corporate scandal in our history
Bullman described the pair as ‘national heroes’, two of a few in this drama. ‘They have effectively acted as the regulators in the absence of a real regulator for 10 years now. We piggybacked off their genius, commitment and determination.’
The writer/director, with factual producer Laura McCutcheon, conducted a prodigious amount of research. You can tell just watching it. The copious documentation involved seeps off the screen, with citations, rights of reply, jargon demystification and social media footage all included.
Converting all of that into a viewer-friendly narrative took two years in the making. It was a process he had finessed with Partygate for Channel 4, a story similarly filled with facts that would beggar belief from audiences.
It will surprise noone who has watched the drama that the legal process involved was ‘incredibly intense’ and required a team of Channel 4 lawyers. Individuals and corporations alike are named and shamed for their involvement in breathtaking turns of the story.
The director explained: ‘We thought very, very seriously about everything that we’ve said in these films. We haven’t said anything that we don’t know to be the truth, ultimately.
‘I just think there are a load of people in our country who make decisions in the knowledge that they’re probably never going to be asked any questions about the decision they’ve taken.
‘When we came across this evidence, it felt really important in cases where it was justified, to name the people that we know did these things,’ Bullman said, noting everyone was given a right of reply on the material.
The response from viewers? ‘Overwhelmingly, fury,’ said Bullman, who had been reading messages right before we spoke.
‘We have a lot of drama on British television, but there isn’t much of it that connects to our real lives. It’s mostly about serial killers and murders and investigations into murder.
‘When you make something which connects to their lived experience, the response you get resonates so much more. It’s so much more intense, because people can recognise their own lives in it. They look into their rivers and they look into the coast and they go on holiday and they come back ill.’
Dirty Business is available to stream on Channel 4.
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