C4 Dirty Business | Windrush Against Sewage Pollution, WASP

Dirty Business | Channel 4

Based on a decade-long investigation, new factual drama Dirty Business follows Windrush Against Sewage Pollution's Ash Smith (David Thewlis) and Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) as they notice that their local patch of the River Windrush in The Cotswolds is becoming polluted.

Dirty Business, will air on Channel 4 and stream on channel4.com from Monday 23 February.

David Thewlis_Ashley Smith_Peter Hammond_Jason Watkins.jpg

Ash Smith (CL) and Peter Hammond (CR) with their on-screen counterparts, David Thewlis (L) & Jason Watkins (R).

Meet the real-life sewage sleuths

Dedication. Expertise. Passion.

Ashley Smith

Founder & Chair of Trustees

Ash Smith served for 30 years with Thames Valley Police, retiring as Detective Superintendent in 2010.

A former angler, scuba diver, and general outdoors person, he has spent a lifetime in and around waters at home and abroad. He has a lifelong love for the natural world and contempt for injustice. He has been investigating the sewage scandal since 2016 and is the author of several exposés of regulatory capture and failure.

Prof Peter Hammond

Data Analysis & Regulatory Compliance

Peter Hammond is a retired university academic and a campaigner for sewage-free rivers.

He was Professor of Computational Biology at UCL’s Institute of Child Health until his retirement in 2015, where he used artificial intelligence and image analysis to detect brain & facial shape differences associated with genetic disorders and prenatal alcohol exposure. He has campaigned with WASP since 2016.

Learn More About Who We Are

Is it real?

Dirty Business is a dramatised account of some of the many investigations and analyses conducted by two of WASP's founder members, Prof Peter Hammond and Ash Smith, since 2017.

WASP is a bigger team than that, but this focuses on the early days and key events. The factual drama is about things that really happened, but not necessarily a blow-by-blow account, which would take hours to recount.

Some of the scenes, such as public meetings, represent a combination of events, and the interactions with whistleblowers are used as a dramatic device to reveal the results of WASP's own enquiries as well as the information given by brave individuals to the producers. WASP does not discuss its engagement with confidential sources.

The WASP team engaged with the Dirty Business producers for over 2 years, providing written and photographic evidence to support all of the storylines used in the episodes, sometimes to enable the use of the exact words used by the subjects.

At the start of the process, we wondered how it would be possible to weave the narrative threads of a national scandal into a coherent, honest, and engaging piece, and now we know.