Toxic Town’s Jack Thorne: ‘We’re not looking at pain exclusively, but at resilience and survival’

The ‘Toxic Town’ writer talks activism, autism and why television has an originality problem. Toxic Town tells the story of a group of Corby mothers including Susan McIntyre (Jodie Whittaker), Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou Wood) and Maggie Mahon (Claudia Jessie). Aided by local solicitor Des Collins (Rory Kinnear) and whistleblower Sam Hagen (Robert Carlyle), they took the Labour-run council to court to prove the link between the dust created during the reclamation of a shuttered British Steel works between 1984 and 1999, and the disproportionately high numbers of children born with limb difference over that period.

Talking over Zoom from his north London home, Thorne is thoughtful, funny, self-effacing and diligent (he follows up over email to clarify a couple of answers he worried – unnecessarily – were garbled or poorly phrased) and was surely the only choice to write this; an absolutely engrossing, moving and witty slice of social commentary with a big, beating heart.

Like virtually everyone involved in the show, he also had no idea about the case until he was approached by executive producer Annabel Jones. With the exception of a dogged Sunday Times journalist, it made few headlines at the time and only a 2020 Horizon documentary has revisited it since the verdict in 2009; an extraordinary state of affairs for both a landmark legal case and a compelling human-interest story. Indeed, he declares himself both “incredibly moved and incredibly jealous” about the impact of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, one of the finest examples of an underreported outrage given fresh impetus by TV drama.

“For the mothers, making this show was about them feeling people hadn’t paid attention, because working-class disabled kids aren’t high on anyone’s agenda,” Thorne explains. “No one said this case was going to be won, yet they pursued it for years when others would have crumbled, trying to keep a roof over their families’ heads while their kids were in and out of hospital, in terrible pain.”.

This story doesn’t want for heroes: Susan is a dauntless, filterless force of nature; Tracey the quiet, grieving mum stepping up even after unthinkable betrayal; Maggie is torn between her child and the husband (Joe Dempsie) who, as a site contractor, would risk his family’s livelihood by speaking out. Real villains, though, are harder to find. Corby council’s leadership (represented, for legal reasons, by Brendan Coyle’s fictional Roy Thomas), reeling from the influx of 11,000 newly unemployed in a town of 50,000 after the plant’s closure, prioritised regeneration and jobs lest their town meet the same grim fate as many mining communities. While their reasoning is given a fair hearing, waste (and its disposal) was clearly a secondary consideration, if it was considered at all.

Worryingly, similar errors of judgement loom under the current Labour government, talking of slashing regulations and prioritising growth – a potentially calamitous trade-off of prosperity against public health put into sharpest focus by water companies dumping sewage into our rivers and seas.

“Red tape and planning laws are what protect us,” argues Thorne. “With the waterways, what was supposed to be an emergency measure is now part of the economic model. In Toxic Town, the idea that children are disabled, in pain or died because of the air they breathed, in a supposedly developed country, is astonishing. We’re about to get into a huge thing with the AI revolution and the modular power stations that could fuel it – but at what cost? I hope there’s some analysis going on into the true cost of waste, but it doesn’t feel like a particular concern to Rachel Reeves. I’m still a Labour Party member and really believe in the cause. I just hope someone’s asking the right questions.”.

Born in Bristol and raised in Newbury during the bypass protests, Thorne was taught to question everything. “I became the Young Labour officer for Newbury constituency party and we’d have meetings about where we stood on this or that. My dad’s a town planner and the only person alive who would say, in all honesty, they love a committee meeting. It’s what defines people like Sam Hagen and my dad, people who put the public good first and don’t worry about being disliked. That constant call to action and civic duty never left me.”.

It was at university that Thorne discovered his vocation after ditching early thoughts of politics and acting. Instead, he turned to writing and hasn’t ever really stopped, describing it as “almost a psychological dependency”. It was also here that he developed a chronic condition called cholinergic urticaria that left him bed-bound and allergic to his own body heat. He was later diagnosed with autism after a listener to his Desert Island Discs episode suggested it was worth consideration, and is now perhaps television’s foremost champion of disability and representation both on and off camera.

Aside from his many high-profile projects addressing the issue, Thorne launched the TV Access Project (TAP) in 2022, aimed at “full inclusion for disabled people working in TV by 2030” and in part prompted by the Covid response suggesting “we decided as a society that we could divide deaths in two”. Thorne declares himself delighted with the progress made.