A new three-part factual drama, Dirty Business, highlights the murky world of the English water industry. This Channel 4 docudrama follows the lives of two concerned citizens from Oxfordshire in south-east England: a retired police detective called Ash Smith and a retired university professor called Peter Hammond, who is an expert in deciphering patterns in big data sets. Together, they have been investigating sewage discharges into their local river for more than a decade.
The series spotlights their struggles to get information from their water company about releases of untreated sewage, and for the Environment Agency (EA) to take their concerns about pollution seriously. Interwoven with their accounts are tragic stories of several families whose lives have been turned upside down through exposure to contaminated water.
During a beach holiday in Devon in 1999, for example, eight-year-old Heather Preen died after contracting a deadly strain of E. coli. The cause of the outbreak was not identified and a verdict of misadventure was returned by a jury. However, several others who visited the beach that day had also contracted that specific strain of E. coli, making causes such as food poisoning unlikely. Elsewhere in England, the series shows rivers depleted of life and discoloured with sewage.
