Dirty Business

Trigger Warning - mention of suicide & violence & sickening greed / minor spoiler alert

“You know what it is,” says Ash. “It’s the free jazz. If that gets out…”

In the concluding episode of Joseph Bullman's new docuseries Dirty Business, Ash speaks in hushed tones with James about the burglary of his home. In the midst of his disquieting investigation into Thames Water's conduct in the River Windrush, his lighthearted jest feels misplaced. It calls back to one of the opening scenes, where his friend Peter mocks him for his appreciation of free jazz. 

Unlike traditional jazz, the subgenre rejects normal chord progressions and fixed structures and focuses on improvisation and freedom. It is a genre characterised by its lack of regulation, resulting in an unrestrained and at points, purely hectic, chaos. On the surface, the reference provides some much needed comic relief. We have watched a young child bleed from her anus, and seen her father hanging from the ceiling. We have seen used sanitary products and dead fish beneath a crust of excrement, and a biology teacher seizing and vomiting on himself in front of his students. The tone of the series is unrelentingly bleak. This reference to free jazz thus takes on a darker and more pointed meaning. 

The long term consequences of Thatcher’s 1989 Water Act, which brought the UK’s water industry into private ownership, are explored in the docuseries. And they are damning. What was promised as a streamlined efficiency became tentative oversight: free reign for these companies to cause untold damage to the country’s rivers and coastlines. Surfers Against Sewage report that in 2024, there were 592,478 confirmed sewage discharges, a figure likely closer to a million when underreporting is accounted for. Sewage gushes into British waters where children swim, dogs play and animals live, every 30 seconds. 

Dirty Business is an unrelenting exposure of England's 'biggest organised crime'. The series opens with a family holiday on a British beach. Laughter is interspersed with gags as the children play in the brown muck that we hope is sand, seaweed and mud. Of course, it isn't, and the parents' alarm is apparent when they spot a spillage of raw sewage onto the promenade. What follows is the visceral decline of Heather, one of their young daughters. This narrative concludes with Heather's mother crumbling into the arms of Heather's father at the foot of her hospital bed as she is taken off of her ventilator. A court case follows. Justice doesn't.

The series brings together the converging stories of investigators, whistleblowers and victims of polluted waterways. Their personal narratives are interspersed with stark, real footage of Britain’s rivers and coastlines, showing the tangible consequences of contamination, as water companies and the Environment Agency embrace what cannot even be described as a light touch regulatory style - rather, inaction and apathy. The series incorporates speeches from politicians such as Liz Truss, David Cameron, Keir Starmer and Margaret Thatcher, placing side by side the political promises and lived realities of polluted waters. Rhetoric and reality clash violently, and with violent consequences.

The Environment Agency, sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), repeatedly turns a blind and enabling eye to the misconduct of water companies. The series suggests that regulation of the water industry has well and truly unravelled. The removal of staff cars within the Environment Agency, under the guise of aiding with net zero, leaves inspectors unable to properly visit and monitor sites. The irony is raw, as environmental oversight crumbles behind the banner of environmental responsibility. 

In 2024, the Labour government brought in a Bill that pledged to 'support the Environment Agency’s ability to bring forward criminal charges against law-breaking water executives'. It promised that bonuses would not be paid if standards were not met, and that severe fines would be dished out for polluting British waters. The Bill put the onus on the water companies to report their own spills, resting on a trust that long ago eroded. These measures thus far have proved merely rhetorical: maps from campaigners show sewage alerts stretching across the country, and executives at Thames Water and Wessex Water received significant bonuses in 2025.

The current system is plainly inefficient. Yet Starmer, elected on a promise that things could only get better, has once more shown himself to be insufficiently radical. Labour has warned that nationalising the water industry would cost £100 billion, but campaign group River Action rejects that argument outright, describing it as a 'simplistic and unrealistic theory' used to avoid decisive intervention in the public and environmental interest. Labour's refusal to nationalise the water industry ultimately protects investors rather than the public, finance rather than the rivers.

'They’re drowning me in numbers,' Ash says early on in the series. But he knows that this is precisely the point. The kind of chaos that creates beauty in the swerving melodies of Ash’s favourite genre works in music, where disorder can be expressive and inventive. But the series reveals how such a lack of restraint seeps into national infrastructure, where in the place of creativity there are untold levels of pollution, poison and neglect. No wonder people are angry, and it is unsurprising that this anger is hardening into a tilt towards the Greens. The question the series proposes is whether this sustained abuse of Britain’s waterways has finally forced the environment back onto the political agenda.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/ Nigel Davies(https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/573222)

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