Dirty Business

We often imagine the global water crisis in epic, far-off terms – melting ice caps, rising seas, oil spills, catastrophic floods and droughts that feel both vast and remote. Pollution rarely announces itself that dramatically. It’s local, incremental, easy to overlook – and as Joseph Bullman’s Dirty Business suggests, easier still to excuse.

Part documentary, part dramatisation, the three-part series follows grassroots campaign group WASP (Windrush Against Sewage Pollution), founded by retired detective Ash Smith (David Thewlis) and former professor Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins). Their story begins, as these things often do, with small but unsettling changes in the river they live beside. What follows is a decade-long investigation into England’s privatised water companies, one that becomes steadily harder to dismiss.

Bullman gets the docudrama format exactly right. The series moves fluidly between real footage – including creeping, insidious shots of raw sewage being discharged into rivers and seas – and dramatised scenes featuring an excellent cast, never allowing the viewer to settle fully into the comfort of fiction. The timeline reaches back to 1999, to the death of an eight-year-old girl after contracting E coli on a Devon beach – a tragedy met, the programme suggests, with immediate corporate denial. From there, Bullman widens the lens, incorporating recordings of Margaret Thatcher championing water privatisation in 1989 and promises of reform made by later prime ministers. The conclusion is difficult to avoid: these are not isolated failures, but systemic ones.

That argument is reinforced visually. The activists and affected communities are filmed with deliberate restraint, resisting the picturesque pull of the Cotswolds and avoiding overly expressive close-ups. This naturalism allows the dramatisation to sit seamlessly alongside the documentary footage. In contrast, the boardrooms are rendered in a polished, fluorescent sterility, with executives shot in a soft focus reminiscent of HBO’s Industry. There is little attempt at subtlety, but it is highly effective: the divide between public consequence and private profit is made unmistakably clear.

At just over two and a half hours, Dirty Business is brisk without feeling rushed. It ends without resolution – the story still unfolding, cautiously hopeful but far from optimistic. And for all its restraint, it’s one of the most effective environmental calls to action in recent years.