Dirty Deeds Review – If This Doesn’t Spark Righteous Outrage About Our Dirty Water Nothing Will | television

WI know, because ITV’s Mr Bates v The Post Office showed us that a TV drama can suddenly exacerbate public revulsion at a scandal, forcing official attitudes to change. Will Dirty Business, Joseph Pullman’s dramatic documentary about the shame of water pollution in England and Wales – the stories of which are based on real-life events – be another TV show that moves the needle? If he doesn’t, maybe nothing will: this is a fist to the face, an outburst of controlled rage that constitutes an unanswerable case for the prosecution.

The Cotswolds, 2016. Two neighbours, recently retired and hungry for a project, noticed a brown shadow in the once beautiful River Windrush. By profession, Ashley Smith (David Thewlis) was a real-life “Line of Duty” cop investigating corrupt cops, while Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) was a mathematics professor at Oxford. Together they search a strange sewage dump, and when the explanation given by the local privatized water company doesn’t make sense, they dig deeper. Ash’s infallible nose for dishonesty, married to the algorithm Peter devised to find patterns in confusing data, builds a picture of water infrastructure ravaged by three decades of underinvestment, leading to an environmental catastrophe on a staggering scale across the country, with thousands of examples of polluted rivers and seas. Untreated wastewater. Real footage, captured by activists to show the extent of the damage, was incorporated into the drama.

The second timeline begins in 1999, when Mark and Julie Brain (Tom McKay and Busy Stirling) take their daughters on holiday to Dawlish in Devon, which Julie chose because it has Blue Flag status, indicating a clean beach. But they found what appeared to be sewage pumping from a pipe on the beach. Eight-year-old Heather steps into dirty water. Within two weeks she died Escherichia coli O157 poisoning.

In the end, the cause of the outbreak was not determined, and the jury returned a verdict of error. The coroner’s recommendations included triple treatment of all wastewater in the area to make it free of pathogens, as well as banning dogs on the beach in the summer.

Pullman navigates what could be an awkward tonal clash. Whereas the scenes in 2016 depict the good-natured banter and sarcasm between talkative Ash and nervous Peter, and are often as funny as they are unsettling, the events of 1999 onwards represent pure horror for the Preens, their true story ending in yet another tragedy that is painted here with devastating force.

Maybe it works, because Dirty Business is very good at using comedy as a weapon. This begins with the corporate statements Ash and Peter receive, smug quibbles that the actors playing the executives read in exactly the same tone, directly to the camera. When the two men realize that the problem lies as much with the regulator, the Environment Agency, as with the water companies, a third story begins, in the EA’s offices in 2008, and the dark absurdity intensifies.

A change was announced towards the end of the Labor administration, the effects of which are expected to be greatly exacerbated by David Cameron’s campaign to cut spending and reduce regulation in the 2000s: ‘operational self-monitoring’ shifts the burden of identifying potential breaches of environmental law from the EU to… the water companies themselves. The scene in which this news is relayed to skeptical EA employees by a manager (played by Charlotte Ritchie) plays like a comedy sketch about a boss informing workers of a patently ridiculous new company policy.

Polman achieves many secondary goals: the futility of fines as punishment for organizations that make more money by breaking the rules; the revolving door of recruitment between regulatory bodies and the companies they regulate; The inflated salaries paid to water officials. But from his choice of how to begin the first episode – he begins with a newsreel of Margaret Thatcher in 1989, predicting that water privatization “is going to go really well” – he never loses focus on the basic point that it is highly unusual for any country to hand over water provision to private companies that exist to make money for investors, and that in the absence of a government willing to roll back privatization, not much will change. A right-of-reply statement provided to the show’s makers by the EA stresses that the government will stop operational self-monitoring, but if that gives you hope, Dirty Business has carefully selected clips of Keir Starmer and former Environment Secretary Steve Reid that will take your plunge once again.

Unlike some similar realistic dramas where the plucky underdogs inevitably triumph, Dirty Business knows the battle is not won. Watkins brilliantly captures the stress of being a citizen fighting opponents with a significant advantage in money and information: at the end of the series, Peter breaks down and almost surrenders. “It’s exhausting,” he tells Ash, anticipating their latest revelation to be met with another round of condescending confusion and “investigations” that go nowhere. “Nothing will happen.”

Is he right? It’s up to us now, because television has done its part. The dirty deeds couldn’t be more obvious.