If your appetite for dramatised accounts of very British public scandals has been triggered by Mr Bates vs The Post Office, then Toxic Town is your next move. It's a four-part Netflix series elucidating a public travesty of pollution and malpractice, now a salient reminder of the dangers of unchecked power.
The writer, Jack Thorne, has developed a portfolio of socially-conscious storytelling. His past works include The Accident, about a devastating explosion at a construction site in a small Welsh town caused by negligence, and the TV film Help about the struggle of care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thorne is back in his wheelhouse and putting the regional spotlight on the unassuming town of Corby, in Northamptonshire.
Corby was once known as “Little Scotland” due to the number of Scots that arrived to work at the town's steelworks right after World War II. However, the town eventually succumbed to industrial decline, like the rest of Britain in the '70s and '80s. The closure of the steelworks resulted in thousands of people unemployed. In the name of economic revitalisation, Corby Borough Council and local investors swooped in with a grand plan to “save the town” by redeveloping the site of the old steelworks, cutting up all the red tape to do so. Uncovered lorries transported toxic waste from the site, driving through residential parts of Corby at high speeds, and then dumped it all in landfill. What seemed like innocuous dust, covering people's cars, clothes, and windows, was in fact dangerous traces of the toxic waste, all being breathed in by the local townspeople, including pregnant women.
Jodie Whittaker delivers an assured performance as Susan McIntyre, the mother who led the campaign for justice, after she realises her son was not the only one to be born with a deformity—in his case, it was his hand. Dozens of babies in Corby around the same time were born with various deformities: Toxic Town depicts the legal battle that ensues. Notably, it is one of the first legal cases in the world to establish a link between airborne contaminants and birth deformities.
The negligent players are personified into a fictional character, Roy Thomas (Brendan Coyle), the local council leader. His character is a composite based on several individuals at the Council who were involved, so understanding of how tragedies like this often involve a complicated web of negligence might be hampered by presenting it in such an overly simplistic way—hard to avoid in a miniseries format. Characters played like out of a soap opera and dialogue was too on the nose at times or reliant on tropes, such as the stereotypical way the opposition barrister was depicted.
Nevertheless, what's apparent is the resolute spirit that connects the different people in Toxic Town towards a common aim. For example, the young Corby-born engineering graduate with a sick father, who is scorned by Roy Thomas for his academic credentials, but then uses that education to be the one to ring the alarm. It's a disguised comment on the unfair double-edged sword of social mobility and the slamming of ‘experts' that has only grown alongside right-wing populism in today's world.
There were the unstoppable tenacious mothers, their lawyer working at risk to his own livelihood, and the scientists who were approached to provide witness evidence on the spread of the toxins, right through to the pub landlady offering space for the campaigners to meet. It's not just one individual that can change things for the better—it's several different groups of people. Toxic Town, while flawed as a series, explores an important piece of British history on a relatively small scale, but whose legacy and significance to global environmental justice movements is, instead, monumental.
Toxic Town is available on Netflix now.
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