As these BBC podcasts prove, British dramatists have too many scandals to choose from

Telegraph

05-03-2025

What sort of country are we? If you watched all of Jack Thorne's excellent Netflix drama Toxic Town, you might come to the conclusion that we are a good one. Flawed, yes, but fundamentally decent, a place where people stand up for each other, where we look out for the little man, where David can beat Goliath by sheer force of will and pluck. The drama ends with some of the Corby mothers, whose children were born with deformities because of the toxic dust thrown up by the reclamation of the local steelworks, having their day in court. I punched the air in those final scenes.
Yet two new BBC podcasts this week, on eerily similar themes yet very different in tone, have left me wondering just how good and fundamentally decent a place the United Kingdom is. Assume Nothing: Killer Dust (BBC Sounds, first five episodes available now) is the history of asbestos in the UK, while In Detail… The Toxic Waste Scandal (BBC Sounds, all episodes available now) tells the same tale as Thorne's Toxic Town, but with a slight twist. Both are stories of corporate and governmental malfeasance, of shameful cover-ups and wilful ignorance, of working-class lives being treated with contempt.
Killer Dust comes from BBC Radio Ulster and exists due to chance – producer Ophelia Byrne was digging through some old newspaper clippings when she came across an irresistible headline from 1967: 'Hush hush process in Ballyclare firm.' This took Byrne to a story about a new factory in which various areas were out of bounds and the staff had to sign an oath of secrecy. The factory, Turner's, produced asbestos cement. Asbestos was legal in 1967, and not completely banned in the UK until 1999, so why was there such secrecy?
Instinctively, we know the answer, but it's still gobsmacking to hear these things spoken out loud. The first recognised death from asbestosis dates back to 1924, but Nellie Kershaw got a pauper's burial because her employer took no responsibility and her health insurance wouldn't pay out. Kershaw worked for Turner's in Rochdale, the same factory as Jason Addy's grandfather, who died in 1974 from mesothelioma. Addy's grandmother got a more-generous-than-usual pension.
In 1965, a medical paper proved the link between even the lightest exposure to asbestos and cancer. In an internal memo later in the decade, one manager at Turner's wrote: 'I fully agree that we should aim high in the promotion of safety, but one must consider this in relation to cost-effectiveness.' In the late 1960s, the Northern Ireland Hospital Authority wrote a directive stating 'the use of asbestos should be avoided at constructional works at hospitals'. The asbestos lobby successfully had those words changed to 'in constructional works, asbestos building products may be used safely with minimal precautions'. The callousness is breathtaking.
Byrne's podcast, which has the tone of an investigative, true-crime thriller, attempts to pick out who knew what and when, while alighting on moving personal stories. Alice Jefferson, who was the subject of John Willis's seismic 1982 documentary Alice: A Fight for Life, worked at the Acre Mill asbestos factory in Hebden Bridge for just nine months in the 1950s – she remembers being surrounded by asbestos dust and even making wigs out of loose fibres.
Her solicitor, John Pickering, who fought for justice for Alice before her death from mesothelioma in the early 1980s, still weeps at the thought of what she and her children went through. In 1969, when the government announced some new regulations surrounding asbestos, one of Turner's executives stated they should show a 'token effort' to ward off the 'evil day when asbestos cannot be applied'. They helped to ward off that evil day for another 30 years. Who knows how many died in the meantime?
The Toxic Waste Scandal features less death – though still some – but is a similar story of greed and turning blind eyes. It is narrated by George Taylor, now 32, who was one of the Corby babies born with a deformity, which gives the podcast a remarkable, insight into the scandal. It also allows for something that Byrne, quite rightly, couldn't attempt – mordant wit. Taylor sprinkles the whole story with a lively gallows humour.
Again, it's an explanation of who knew what and when (and the answers, of course, are sickening), but the level of detail is superb. Anecdotes about the thick red dust that would cake the town (Taylor's parents owned a pub frequented by 'clean-up' workers and would engage in a daily Sisyphean battle with the dust); details of the proposed theme park, WonderWorld, with its monorail journey through the human body in a carriage shaped like a pork sausage; a ribbon-cutting ceremony by Michael Heseltine which was hailed as 'the last piece of red tape in Corby'. And then the mothers, who blamed themselves.
You'll think of Aberfan, of Grenfell, of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. And you'll wonder how many more indignities are being visited upon people in Britain today, by those who value cost-effectiveness above all else.