Toxic Town comes out a month after Bank of Dave 2, the film inspired by the true story of a man from Burnley who helped fight unethical payday loans companies. Jack Thorne's four-part series platforms another underrepresented part of the country, Corby in the East Midlands. It’s encouraging to see Netflix tackling more important stories that aren’t based in the south, even if it is with mixed results.
We kick off in Corby in 1995 when local women including Tracey and Susan, played by Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood and Doctor Who’s Jodie Whittaker, bond over the discovery that their babies are disabled. It turns out that dozens of children are similarly affected, and many display the same symptoms of underdeveloped fingers and toes.
After a chance meet with a journalist sniffing around the story, Susan becomes inspired to take on the people who have caused the problem. Corby was a hub for steel making until the late 1970s but irresponsible practices meant the air was filled with poisonous toxins that caused the birth defects. It's a true story: Corby Borough Council had been dumping toxic waste from 1984 to 1999 but only admitted negligence in 2010.
Across four 50 minute episodes, Toxic Town is decently bingeable, mainly because the story is just so shocking. The fallout of the corporate mispractice is a fascinating examination of the lengths people will go to to defend their corner, even in the face of pretty indisputable evidence – and remember, this really wasn’t that long ago.
Jack Thorne’s script sketches vivid characters on both sides but focuses on the perspectives of the affected families. Aimee Lou Wood is excellent as vulnerable, loveable Tracey, the sort of person who, like so many of us, feels predisposed to avoid confrontation but is forced to go totally out of her depth in her pursuit of justice. As her counterpoint, Jodie Whittaker is immense as the livewire social justice warrior Susan, and she puts on a decent Glaswegian drawl too (many workers came down from Scotland to work in the industry).
They’re joined by a rollcall of British acting legends who represent people equally infuriated by the injustices. Robert Carlyle is on incredible form as softie council worker Sam and Rory Kinnear is a predictably comforting presence as the lawyer representing the women. Director Minkie Spiro, of Better Call Saul and Downton Abbey, paints a vivid picture of Corby, from its lively pubs and homes to the harrowing omnipresence of industrial vehicles dumping smog on the town as locals go about their daily lives.
The trouble is there’s often a soapy conventionality that hampers the potential for emotional depth. Perhaps that is down to Thorne’s script: Susan feels too good for the in-fighting with her on-off boyfriend (Michael Socha), and while Brendan Coyle’s towering performance as head council honcho and all-round badman Roy Thomas is triggering because we’ve all had terrible bosses like him, he is ultimately too villainous to feel believable (the steel worker leads are fictitious but based loosely on real people). He is interesting though, getting across the attitude of men with egos so big they could never conceivably realise they’re wrong.
Thorne puts each episode in a slightly different era, ranging from the mid-nineties to the late-noughties, but it doesn’t quite work. A longer time frame allowing us to meet the children with the disabilities later in life, perhaps incorporating them as adult characters, might have provided the opportunity for pathos, but as it is it feels distracting.
Given Netflix’s penchant for a happy ending I’m not sure why they didn’t use the time-hopping element to fast forward to the present day: in 2019 Corby was named the fastest-growing borough outside London, and employment rates were recently higher than the national average at 75 per cent. Still, with one more Netflix gambit this year, the crime drama Adolescence, Thorne has another shot at a spring smash.
