Why Channel 4 water pollution scandal show Dirty Business is the campaigning TV drama of the year

The working title for new Channel 4 drama Dirty Business was Isle of Shite. The three-part series, which airs on consecutive nights from 23-25 February, charts the real stories of the pollution of England’s waterways since the water companies were privatised in 1989.

It features the amateur investigators who uncovered the shocking truth about raw sewage in their local river and the whistleblowers who helped get the story out. And it also features the stories of the victims of what has the potential to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in the country’s history.

Heather Preen died aged eight years old, just two weeks after contracting the most aggressive strain of E. coli during a family beach holiday in Dawlish, Devon. Her mother, Julie Maughan (played by Posy Sterling in Dirty Business), has fought for change ever since.

Read more:

• How to fix the UK’s broken water system
• I waded through a river of raw sewage to meet the man trying to save London’s waterways
• ‘It won’t work’: Labour can’t fix broken water system without tackling ownership, experts say

The hope is that, by bringing together the staggering facts about the amount of raw sewage flowing into our rivers and waterways with the real world impact of the scandal, the public will be moved to demand real change.

“Our rivers and our coastal waters are marinated in excrement, urine, unmetabolized drugs, sanitary towels and anything else the water companies choose to put in the sewage that they dump straight into our waterways as the cheapest method of getting rid of it,” says Joseph Bullman, writer-director of Dirty Business.

“The water companies dump sewage in our waterways and almost every time they do that, that’s a crime. Yet no water company owner, executive or hedge fund manager has ever been prosecuted.

“When you watch the films, you can see the scope and the extent of the scandal. It’s the worst corporate scandal in our history.”

As the series launches, Channel 4 have unveiled a new public art installation called The Fountain of Filth on London’s Southbank. This is provocative stuff. The striking statue depicts children, women and men vomiting brown water. Above them is a businessman (who looks rather like Keir Starmer) clutching a briefcase overflowing with cash to represent the water companies.

“We have a government that was elected partly on the pledge to clean up the cesspool that is our water companies and our regulators who have operated policies which have had the effect of enabling this festival of greed which the water companies have become,” Bullman told Big Issue at the unveiling of The Fountain of Filth.

“They were elected on that. But their white paper is essentially about backdoor deregulation. In light of the fact that the Environment Agency has failed spectacularly, the Labour government’s response is less regulation and further involvement from the international private asset management funds who own our water companies. It’s really staggering.”

In response to the allegations made in the show, an Environment Agency spokesperson said the current government has committed to ending “self-monitoring” for water companies and added: “The depiction… in this film does not reflect the significant changes the organisation has undergone in recent years to better tackle water pollution…

“More people, better data and increased powers mean we will always act on intelligence of potential offences.”

The cast of Dirty Business is led by renowned actors David Thewlis and Jason Watkins, as unlikely double act Ashley Smith and Peter Hammond – recent Big Issue Changemakers as co-founders of Windrush Against Sewage Pollution.

One spent his career investigating bent coppers, the other was a professor of computational biology, both live next to the River Windrush and had witnessed its transformation. By combining their talents they are able to navigate the obfuscation of the water companies and the complex data showing the output from their local Burford sewage works, near Oxford.

Speaking at the statue unveiling, Smith said: “They’ve normalised dumping untreated sewage, and we know what the consequences can be. Because we know about Heather Preen, who died from it. And we know that they tried to cover that up and remove the link from sewage. How many more people have been victims? We do not know.

“We’re not finished. It’s what we do next that counts. It’s what this programme does and how we do not tolerate being treated like this, how we do not just let the staff of those companies take the blame for corporate greed.

“You can’t change your water company. You can’t give up water. So they’ve got us. We have to fight – and now’s the moment to do it. We cannot waste this.”

A spokesperson for Defra said: “After years of failure, this government has taken action to tackle the sewage scandal, and clean up our rivers, lakes and seas for good.

“We’ve banned unfair bonuses, secured record levels of investment and introduced landmark legislation to hold water companies to account – including jail time for water company executives who obstruct investigations. 

“Our long term reforms will mean there is a new, single regulator focused on preventing problems before they occur. We are ending the era of water company self-monitoring, introducing new MOT-style checks on water company assets and bringing in ‘no notice’ inspections to rebuild customer trust and protect the environment.”

But the new series launches as campaign group Surfers Against Sewage reveal the latest data showing that sewage poured into England’s bathing waters for 124,717 hours in 2025, and 1,236 people reported sickness after using the water. This year, English water companies have already dumped sewage into bathing waters for 46,141 hours. 

SAS have also launched a new petition calling on the government to put public health before profit, with Giles Bristow, Surfers Against Sewage chief executive, saying: “For three decades, millions of hours of sewage have been dumped into the nation’s waters while millions in payouts have been siphoned off.

“But this isn’t about data and statistics. It’s about Heather [Preen]. It’s about Reuben [a young surfer who believes he contracted Meniere’s disease after surfing in polluted waters]. A mother in surgery after a swim. A surfer gambling with his health. A child rushed to hospital after a day at the beach. Real people, still suffering, while shareholders get richer. You cannot put a price on clean water. But this government has. And we are all paying it.” 

By bringing together the science, the activism and the real-life impact of the ongoing sewage scandal in an accessible television drama, Dirty Business should be a gamechanger. But then again, so should the death of Heather Preen back in 1999.

Dirty Business airs on Channel 4 at 9pm on 23, 24, 25 February 2026

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