Emotions and story behind Netflix’s Toxic Town with a local viewpoint

The latest Netflix hit show, Toxic Town, is an emotional watch. It’ll tug at your feelings in several ways, especially if you have children of your own or young nieces or nephews. For myself, it had an extra edge as I watched the story unfold in this new dramatization. 

Let's get down to the basics of the series. Released in late February on Netflix, Toxic Town has a big-name cast list. Jodie Whittaker, Aimee Lee Wood, Claudie Jessie, Brendan Coyle, Rory Kinnear, and Robert Carlyle pick up the lead roles. That's an incredible amount of experience from top dramas and films to bring together here. 

The show follows the lives of some families in Corby,  a small UK town dealing with the closure of the local steel works. As the major employer in the town, there was huge unemployment to deal with. The council and others worked to reclaim the land so the town and industry could be rebuilt to provide jobs. 

Netflix drama shows how the Toxic Town happened

That’s hard enough on lives until some young families are devastated by birth defects. As the drama progresses, it becomes clear that these aren't isolated and are above normal levels. As questions start to be asked, the focus switches to the toxic nature of the reclamation works.

The drama has already shown a disregard for basic health and safety requirements in the work and clearly demonstrated how the local people were being exposed to toxic dust and elements. 

Seeing the heartbreak and challenges of the affected children and parents is quite a tough watch. Especially when you can see it shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. It’s quite a sobering thought, personally, as I watched the show. I was raised in Corby, where the story is set. I went to school there, both my and my wife’s fathers had jobs at the steelworks, and we remember well the closure and loss of their jobs.

We had fortunately moved away from the town before the impacting work and before we had our own children. As regular visitors back to family and friends who still stay in Corby, the story of the people there resonates very strongly. 

Strong families and mothers in Toxic Town (Spoiler alert)

Back to the drama itself, Whittaker, Wood, and Jessie play impacted mothers who get together with others to bring a court case against the local authority, Corby Borough Council. Coyle and Carlyle play councillors on opposing sides of the argument, with Coyle representing the council leader. 

Kinnear steps in as a lawyer who helps lead the legal case and brings it to the High Court. It’s by no means an easy ride, with plenty of conflict arising at times between mothers, their families, and the council.

As it’s a true story, it’s not a big spoiler reveal, but do look away from this paragraph if you don’t want to know the legal outcome. The final episode tells how the case was won in court and the relief of the families afterward. It is another emotional set of scenes in the show that will likely have you punching the air as you watch. However, even that is somewhat tinged and split as the story reveals. 

This is a powerful drama; the characters are all strong, and there are superb performances from the cast. It has been described as the UK Erin Brockovitch, and I can see the connections. I haven't got an inside view on how accurate the story depiction is, but I can comment on the setting.

Toxic Town looks true to the real steel town I know

Watching with my Corby background, it’s a reasonable view of the town and the people. Even if the scenes were filmed miles away in Bolton, and the Rockingham Arms pub featured is nothing like the real one. At times, it perhaps didn't show just how tough life was there in often poor conditions, but the people always pulled together as a community as the drama illustrates well. 

Corby was well known as a Scottish town in England as many families, mine and my wife’s included, had traveled down to England for work many years before. That doesn't come across, but while it’s an important part of the town’s identity, it has no impact on the story at all. The depiction of the late 1980s and early 1990s period is well done, too. It should be a big hit for Netflix and is another big plus on those actors' CVs. 

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