A new drama about the scandalous state of Britain’s rivers and coastal waters has been hailed as the next Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

Will the public’s reaction to the three-part series Dirty Business on Channel 4 jolt the government into action, like the award-winning ITV account of the wrongfully prosecuted subpostmasters? Campaigners are hopeful that the series will pressure ministers to deliver meaningful solutions to Britain’s sewage crisis.

They could have called this anger-inducing series Mr Hammond and Mr Smith vs the Water Bosses. For its chief protagonists are Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins) and Ashley Smith (David Thewlis), two men who became eco-sleuths after realising something stank about Britain’s privatised water industry.

The drama paints an ugly picture of the water companies, which, since their privatisation in the 1980s, have sucked up billions in profits and spewed out millions of discharges of untreated sewage.

Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer and water activist who has been a backer of The Times’s Clean It Up campaign, says he has been contacted by a huge number of people in recent days who were infuriated by Dirty Business. “It portrayed in the starkest way possible the brutal reality of what’s been going on in the background: that even behind all of these sensational headlines and the Times campaign and the work that everybody’s done, you see the lengths the water companies, the Environment Agency and indeed the government, were going...

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