Toxic Town, review: Netflix feels an odd home for this story of a particularly British scandal

Telegraph

27-02-2025

Do Netflix viewers the world over want to watch a drama featuring the inner workings of Corby Borough Council? The ratings for their new drama Toxic Town will tell. And you can be certain that the BBC will have a wary eye on those viewing figures because the corporation has been justifying its existence of late by saying that it tells the kind of British stories that US streamers wouldn't touch, yet stories don't come much more British than this one.
Some years after British Steel closed down its operations in Corby, Northants, in 1979, the council began a regeneration project. But the toxic waste being transported away from the site came off the lorries in clouds of dust, and a burnt orange sludge ran through the streets. Pregnant women exposed to the contaminants gave birth to babies with limb deformities. The case eventually reached court, in a trial which forms the last of these four episodes.
You can see the appeal for Netflix execs: it is a real-life David and Goliath tale, and in the scrappy Susan McIntyre, one of the mothers whose child was affected, they have an Erin Brockovich figure. McIntyre is played by Jodie Whittaker, while Aimee Lou Wood and Claudia Jessie are cast as two other young mums, Tracey and Maggie. As the series goes on they team up with a lawyer (Rory Kinnear, reliably good) who is keen to take their case, aided by a young whistleblower (Stephen McMillan).
Seasoned writer Jack Thorne knows how to hit the beats with a drama like this. The first episode concentrates on Susan and Tracey, efficiently introducing us to their respective relationships – Tracey's husband is a keeper, Susan's partner is not – and following them from pregnancy test to the shock of learning that their babies have been born 'deformed' (and with more serious health problems, in the case of Tracey's daughter). The personal stuff is more engrossing than the courtroom scenes, which verge on the dull.
Brendan Coyle and Robert Carlyle put in fine performances as the council leader and his honourable deputy. Whittaker fizzes, although you may need subtitles to decipher every word of her Scottish accent, and Michael Socha stands out as her good-for-nothing partner.
It's very watchable and, in the mould of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, highlights a scandal which failed to imprint itself on the public consciousness. But Netflix does feel like an odd home for this drama. You get the sense that Thorne has kept the plot simple and by-numbers to please the streamer, yet his dialogue is unapologetically homegrown (Americans may find themselves googling terms such as 'bog brush'). Robert Carlyle delivering the line 'You were always a w---er but you never used to be a c---' is surely as British as it gets.