In many ways, Dirty Business is 27 years too late. Heather Preen was just eight years old in 1999 when she contracted the pathogen E coli 0157 while playing on a beach in Devon. Unbeknownst to her family, sewage had been illegally dumped into the sea by water companies. Just two weeks later, she died.
Five others also contracted E coli on the same day at the same beach, but Heather’s death – which should have been a national outrage – was declared ”death by misadventure” by a jury. Now, her story is the starting point of Channel 4’s new excellent and enraging drama, which flits between Heather’s death and the aftermath at the end of the 90s, to 2016 when concerned neighbours Ashley Smith (David Thewlis) and Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) set out to investigate why their local river in the Cotswolds, Windrush, has turned brown.
Ash and Peter turn out to be quite the team – one is a former anti-corruption police detective, the other a computational scientist who creates an algorithm which can detect inconsistencies in the water company’s logbooks. Their investigation soon reveals that in the nine years that Peter has data for, two sewage works – Whitney and Church Hanborough – have dumped untreated water into the river 1,000 times. “This isn’t an accident,” he says. “It’s a policy”. To which Ash replies: “This is starting to look like organised crime.”
