A NEW docudrama has the potential to do for the issue of water pollution what Mr Bates vs the Post Office did for the scandal with which that programme dealt.
Dirty Business (Channel 4, 23 February) is the real-life story of the egregious polluting of Britain’s waterways, beginning with the dumping of sewage into the River Windrush by Thames Water. It stars Jason Watkins and David Thewlis as neighbours turned investigators who become concerned when the fish in the river start dying off. Watkins — excellent as the Scouse computer geek Peter Hammond — teams up with Ash Smith (Thewlis), who is a real-life version of Line of Duty’s Ted Hastings: a catcher of bent coppers who is a former detective with the Thames Valley Police corruption unit.
They start with one simple question: Why is the river brown? The answer is, of course, because the water company had pumped into it massive levels of sewege, or, as the company politely terms it, “effluence”: polite-sounding word, dreadful meaning.
It is an all-too-familiar tale of institutional cover-up and enraging injustice. The complexity of the story is skilfully handled by weaving together timelines and using graphics to illustrate complicated data. The two leads have the gravitas and talent to carry it all with quiet authority.
If you watched Mr Bates — or, indeed, if you’ve had protracted dealings with the management of many other institutions, including the Church of England — you will recognise the playbook: the batting back of probing questions with anodyne, robotic responses; the obfuscatory language and attempts to delay, evade, and hedge. Most telling of all is that the Environment Agency, back in 2008, initiated a policy of “operator self-monitoring”. An employee rightly asks: “You mean it’s Thames’s job to tell us when they’ve dumped sewage?” Quite! A powerful institution marking its own homework: what could possibly go wrong?
After that, I was desperate for some light entertainment. It was provided by the actor Danny Dyer and his daughter Dani in The Dyers’ Caravan Park (Sky One, 24 February). The action begins as Dyer, sporting a 1980s-style moustache, walks through a caravan park to the strains of Elgar’s “Nimrod” and eulogises his childhood holidays — apparently, the best times of his life. He has invested his money and reputation in a static caravan park on the Isle of Sheppey. With help from his eldest daughter, Dani, he is hoping to bring back the great British holidays that he remembers so fondly.
Despite the decidedly fruity language (or, at least in part, because of it), I laughed all the way through this. It is more sketch show than documentary, particularly in the scene with the two Ds on ride-on mowers. Despite their initial cluelessness, I found myself cheering them on. It is a worthy venture with its heart in the right place.