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”.
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.
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.
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.
