Clearing the air
DQ heads to Manchester and the set of Toxic Town, where writer Jack Thorne, executive producer Annabel Jones and stars including Jodie Whittaker discuss making Netflix’s four-part drama based on the enduring impact of one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals.
If the extraordinary success of Mr Bates vs the Post Office has turbocharged socially conscious television drama, one of its beneficiaries may prove to be Toxic Town, Jack Thorne’s four-part drama for Netflix.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, a number of children in the Northamptonshire town of Corby were born with limb difference after their mothers were exposed to toxic dust created during the council’s reclamation of the local British Steel works that closed in 1981.
Unlike the Post Office scandal, this reached a conclusion of sorts when the families demonstrated the link and won compensation in court in 2009. Even so, there remains a sense of unfinished business among the mothers themselves.
“I asked Susan McIntyre whether she feels the people in her life know what she went through,” says Jodie Whittaker, who plays the woman who led the campaign. “I think this will shine a light on the fight they put up with grace and integrity and teeth. I love them so much for how different they are and how much they’ve given of themselves for us to be able to portray it, because without that, this piece wouldn’t be as impactful as I think it is.”
Drama Quarterly has come to Manchester to meet the cast and watch a pivotal scene, in which Susan bonds with her baby son for the first time, as she comes to terms with his upper-limb difference and of life having changed forever. “I think I might be the worst mother you could ask for,” Susan says a little later. “But I’ll set it right.”
Whittaker is the anchor for a remarkable ensemble: Aimee Lou Wood and Claudia Jessie play fellow mothers Tracey Taylor and Maggie Mahon, Joe Dempsie is the latter’s husband Derek, Rory Kinnear and Robert Carlyle are the solicitor and whistleblower who helped them, and Brendan Coyle is the closest there is to an antagonist, playing fictionalised council leader Roy Thomas.
Whittaker spent time with her real-life counterpart, as did many of her castmates, and she can’t speak highly enough of the real women at the centre of this story. “These lionesses had their cubs in their mouths, and however long it took, they carried them to the finish line. They’ve had so much to fight.”
The production was no cakewalk either. It began by chance, when executive producer Annabel Jones (whose company Broke & Bones, founded with Charlie Brooker, produced the series) was approached about the case by a friend from Corby and instantly saw its potential.
“At the beginning, there was a core group of mums who were convinced that something was wrong,” she recalls. “We pulled on them for our three main characters. This poisoning was airborne, so it was democratic and affected everyone. The mothers had to come together and overcome their slightly different styles of parenting and complaining. It was about representing the tapestry of the town.”
With a seasoned television director in Minkie Spiro (The Three-Body Problem, Fosse/Verdon) on board, Jones saw Thorne as the logical choice to script it.
“When we start the drama, it’s 1995,” says Jones. “There was a real energy and optimism that felt like the epitome of New Labour. They loved the success of the town, that working-class spirit of looking after your own but doing it responsibly and professionally. I was thinking about Jack’s work on This is England, that ability to not go down the ‘misery working-class porn’ vibe, as well as his genius in interrogating complexity when it comes to where responsibility and culpability lies.”
Thorne, who grew up the son of a town planner with a sense of civic duty inbuilt and who has long been a vocal champion of disability representation in television, instinctively responded to the issue (“waste is an obsession if mine, and as a country we need to have a conversation about it”), but it was one of the characters who convinced him there was a proper drama to be written.
“Susan was the natural leader,” says Thorne. “I loved everything I read about her, then I met her and loved her even more – she’s this complicated, wonderful person, joyous to write. The moment when I went, ‘OK, I think this is interesting as a story, separate to important as an issue,’ was when I read about Tracey. Having gone through so much, she was excluded from the case – in a story about haves and have nots, there had to be haves and have nots even among the mothers, and I found her resilience unbearably moving.
“With Maggie, it’s about Maggie and Derek. As a contractor on the reclamation, he was put in an impossible situation. Their son was born with limb difference, but if he spoke out then the industry wouldn’t employ him again.”
Yet for all the complexity of the heroes, there are no villains. “None of the council were bad men,” Carlyle explains. “They couldn’t imagine this was going to be the end result of the steelworks coming down. Progress has to be seen to be done, and they didn’t want it to become a sink town like the mining villages in the 1970s.”
“This show should be a complicated moral ask of the audience,” adds Kinnear. “Everyone believes they’re doing the right thing, and for the benefit of other people rather than just for themselves. The council have the balancing act of a certain budget when the prime industry of your town has been closed down, with thousands unemployed, but public finance and public health must go hand in hand. We can see that now with the waterways – red tape is there for a reason.”
Coyle, who was “born and bred” in Corby, describes the town as “desperately bleak throughout the 1980s, a horrible place” in the wake of the plant closure, yet he too knew nothing of the court case. He recalls, still clearly affected, the impact of filming the final verdict in the courtroom. “We shot the court case in Liverpool Town Hall, and we had mothers and supporting artists, kids with limb difference, and when the verdict was read out verbatim, there was this great roar in the courtroom. It was really powerful.”
When Toxic Town debuts on Netflix on February 27, Thorne hopes that sense of emotional engagement will translate on screen, and applauds the streamer for backing it. “I think it’s really important that Netflix are doing this. They’ve changed their model and are making local shows for local audiences, which seems to be provoking some really interesting choices, like Baby Reindeer: a very British story which they trusted would travel, and I hope Toxic Town will as well.”
“It’s about three women having to change themselves,” he adds. “They’re forced into something they’re unprepared for and live up to that when many others would have crumbled. I don’t know that I could have been that strong with all the stuff going on: your marriage is in trouble, your kid is in hospital constantly, you’re trying to keep a roof over everyone’s head. No one said this case was going to be won, and they found time to pursue a case for years and years. They’re amazing.”
tagged in: Annabel Jones, Brendan Coyle, Jack Thorne, Jodie Whittaker, Netflix, Robert Carlyle, Rory Kinnear, Toxic Town