Dead Body Squad (also known as The Dead Body Squad) is a British documentary which was originally broadcast as an episode of Channel 4's Cutting Edge documentary series, which takes a journey into the world of specialist cleaners whose job it is to scrub up human remains after death.
It was first transmitted in the UK on Channel 4 in July 2006. It is an hour long.
Dead Body Squad aired for the first time in South Africa as a one-off special on DStv's Crime & Investigation Network on Tuesday 29 July 2008, at 20h30.
Repeats
Wednesday 30 July: 02h30, 14h30
Saturday 2 August: 23h10
Sunday 3 August: 05h10, 17h10
Synopsis
Macabre but sensitive, dark but sometimes uncomfortably funny: this is a journey into the world of the specialist cleaners who work in the shadow of the emergency services.
The number of people living alone in Britain has more than tripled in the last 40 years and so business is booming.
Matt Brooks runs the biggest heavy duty cleaning company in the South East. Each year they deal with more than 100 undiscovered deaths and suicides.
An undiscovered body quickly begins to decompose and suicide brings with it its own complications. Once the body has been found and taken away, Matt and his team are called in to clean up what is left behind.
That there is money to be made in heavy duty cleaning, blood and death is a fact not lost on ex-Rentokil employee Steve and former estate agent Nick, who have started a small business together to take on the dirtiest of cleaning work.
They will clean up crack houses, brothels, dirty needles and faeces but it's the lucrative and illusive 'body jobs' they're really after.
Who would want this work? Who are the people and what are the lives, hidden behind the endless trail of 'body jobs'? Each 'call-out' with the cleaners brings us closer to the people who have died and the friends and relatives they have left behind.