How far would you go to fight for your children? That’s the question posed by Toxic Town, a new limited series that dramatizes the true story of the Corby poisonings that started decades ago, in the 1980s. If you’re not familiar with the environmental scandal that rocked the small English former steel town of Corby, you’re not alone. Even Toxic Town writer Jack Thorne (The Swimmers, His Dark Materials) was unaware of the case that’s been called “the British Erin Brockovich,” in which a group of mothers whose children were born with severe health issues confronted their town’s leadership about its alleged mismanagement of toxic waste materials.
“I didn’t know the story,” Thorne tells Tudum. “I’d never heard of the people involved, and I’d never heard of the case until it was brought to me by [my co-executive producers Annabel Jones and Charlie Brooker].” Once Thorne dove into the material, he was shocked at how perfectly the unfolding of events aligned itself with the dramatic structure of a television series. “It had within it a lot of drama,” he says, “whether it’s the story of the trial itself, or whether it’s the way that these women got together and battled together.”
Read on to learn more about Toxic Town, now streaming on Netflix.
Based on one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals, Toxic Town is the story of the people at the heart of the Corby poisonings. Focusing on a group of mothers who took on a David and Goliath battle for justice, the series traces the years of their fight as a terrible truth comes to the surface.
“The more you look into it, the more complicated it all becomes,” Thorne says of the story. “I’ve done legal dramas before, but this one … being taken through the actual truth of it and seeing the journey that they had to go on in order to prove this, I found very surprising and shocking.”
Given what the women had to do in order to get accountability from those in power, Thorne also found their commitment to be tremendously inspiring. “There’s just so much internalized blame that these women obviously had [to deal with],” he says. But, he notes, they were able to “collectively join together and work to actually empower not just themselves and their children, living or dead, but a whole community.”
“It was just so incredible to see and to see how it affected other parts of their life,” he continues. “It’s not just this simple hero’s journey of women banding together and fighting the man and getting this court victory. There’s nothing simple about it at all. You see where their power comes from, which is really just in the most basic level of humanity that they show for each other.”
Thorne says of the cast: “Truly, it was a company of dreams. I couldn’t believe that we were able to get these people, and that they were prepared to be part of this story. And boy, did they all deliver.”
“[Robert Carlyle] just transformed himself,” Thorne says. “And Jodie [Whittaker, as one of the mothers at the center of the case] similarly … I’ve never seen her do anything like this, sort of finding that chaos and that truth and that bravery that Susan has got. And then Aimee Lou [Wood] — that quietness and that tragedy. Each of them just brought something new that I’d never seen them do before. And when you’re with a cast that’s doing that consistently, it’s so exciting to watch and it’s so beautiful.”
The cast of Toxic Town includes:
Yes. Toxic Town is a dramatized series that’s based on the real case of the Corby poisonings, which saw a group of mothers (three of whom are played in the series by Whittaker, Wood, and Jessie) challenge their town’s council over alleged toxic waste mismanagement. It’s a story of community resilience in the face of institutional negligence and greed — and the power of parents’ love for their children.
“It’s a genuinely working-class story,” Thorne says. “It’s a story of people who are not part of the system that have never thought the system would work for them, working within the system and [fighting for] the result they deserved.” Hear, hear.
Toxic Town is now streaming on Netflix.
