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5 hours ago
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Corby, Northamptonshire, 1995: the disused steelworks that were once the heartbeat of the town are to be redeveloped into housing and a theme park. As the land is cleared, a crimson dust that will later be shown to contain cadmium and other highly toxic substances is stirred up; open-topped trucks full of the stuff career past unknowing residents to a messy landfill. And so the scene is set for Toxic Town, a true-story drama about a very British scandal.
Susan McIntyre’s partner works at the site, while Tracey Taylor is an accountant there who has to sluice thick red sludge off her car every evening when she goes home. Susan (Jodie Whittaker) and Tracey (Aimee Lou Wood) meet on a maternity ward, before both give birth to children with disabilities. When Susan realises other women nearby have had similar outcomes, she starts a campaign for justice. Meanwhile, concerns raised within the council about poisonous soil are silenced with bribes and bullying by senior figures who won’t allow anything to jeopardise the construction project, which had a dodgy tendering process. It’s not until 2009 that Susan and co are able to demonstrate council negligence and achieve a landmark court victory.
In the darker moments here, there are flashes of the bleak malevolence of Red Riding or Sherwood. Cause trouble for the greasy-lipped men in double-breasted suits and they will send thugs in donkey jackets to smash up your car; threaten them with legal consequences for corruption and the building with all the evidence in it will mysteriously catch fire.
But, however distressing the facts of the case, Toxic Town feels a responsibility to ensure its audience sticks it out. So, ultimately, this is a bittersweet feelgood piece, more along the lines of Britflicks such as Pride, Brassed Off and The Full Monty, where ordinary people suffer in deindustrialised towns that have intractable problems, but score a win by supporting each other. The shape of the drama is familiar; cosy, even.
At times, it spoon-feeds us. At the end of a scene, where soon-to-be-pregnant Maggie (Claudia Jessie) hangs her husband’s discarded work jeans on the rotary airer in the back garden and beats the dust out of them with a badminton racket, perhaps we don’t need a slow-motion shot of malignant particles mushrooming into the air. When the dispute reaches court, the barrister representing the council doesn’t have to be so eyeball-swivellingly malicious. The property developer who makes his fortune while his home town suffers could be less of a grinning cartoon villain.
Similarly, the wider importance of the story is not allowed to get lost in subtext. Toxic Town is about fighting back against politics that prioritises “profits over people” and if you didn’t twig that on your own, the script has one of the good guys use that exact phrase. It’s concerned with how “red tape” is a term used only by shysters, because it always means measures that hinder moneymen from shafting working people – again, this is spelled out in the dialogue.
The show is moral about not letting greed trample community. Despite this being illustrated by a struggle that concluded a decade and a half ago, Toxic Town feels fresh. It arrives only a year after Mr Bates vs the Post Office turned an against-the-odds fight for justice into the biggest drama on TV (the campaign’s first public meeting, where the mothers realise their strength in numbers, has heavy Bates vibes) and lands in a political moment where leaders of various stripes are pretending that slashing regulations is an urgent public concern.
All that being the case, the occasional cheesiness of Toxic Town doesn’t matter, especially when the writer, Jack Thorne, is so careful to mine this dire situation for nuggets of precious humanity. The emotional journey undergone by parents of disabled children, as they fight the instinct to believe that they are at fault and try to improve their children’s lives without treating them as a problem, is sensitively sketched. The difficulty for wronged individuals in taking a stand, when powerful enemies have ensured that doing so will come at great cost, is explored and acknowledged. The friendship between the two central characters – the sharp, belligerent and often scathingly funny Susan orbiting around Tracey’s quiet wisdom – is perfectly performed by an obviously award-worthy Whittaker and a less demonstrative but equally brilliant Wood, who can convey all Tracey’s determination and smothered pain with a curve of a sad smile.
For the people involved – while some characters are fictional, Whittaker, Wood and Jessie play real women – this was a life-defining fight that deserves to be celebrated. If Toxic Town turns it into an easy dramatic win, it is forgiven.
