The performances make Toxic Town worth the anger it stirs up. Jodie Whittaker and Aimee Lou Wood give this familiar injustice drama the force that its tidier, more sentimental passages sometimes lack.
Toxic Town is a good, sometimes over-neat drama about mothers who should never have had to become campaigners. Across four episodes, director Minkie Spiro makes the Corby toxic waste case comprehensible without letting the legal dispute take over from the families affected by it. The series is strongest when it stays with the women and weakest when it starts explaining what their struggle means. We recommend it for the performances, with a reservation about its fondness for telling us things we have already understood.
The writing, credited to Jack Thorne and Amy Trigg, understands that the children cannot simply become evidence in a legal case. Their mothers have lives to carry on with, even as the campaign demands more of them. That attention gives the story weight, but the script is less willing to grant complexity to the people opposing them. Some characters are made so plainly objectionable that the drama barely needs to establish what they have done.
Jodie Whittaker, as Susan McIntyre, gives the series the complication its less sympathetic characters lack. Susan’s fierceness never quite conceals how exposed she feels, and Whittaker makes keeping up the fight seem like something that requires constant effort. We were moved by the vulnerability she lets show while Susan presses for justice for her child. It matters because a drama like this can so easily make a campaigning mother seem incapable of having a moment’s doubt.
Aimee Lou Wood’s Tracey Taylor gives the series an equally persuasive account of the hurt behind the campaign. Wood allows determination and suffering to remain visible together, so the women never settle into a single, reassuring image of courage. The pleasure of watching these actors is in how little they need to advertise their characters’ decency. Spiro’s sympathy is clear throughout, and at its best the programme allows us to care about the mothers without turning every encounter into a lesson.
The cinematography by Sergio Delgado and Tony Miller is clear and polished, sometimes to a fault. Alongside Alexandra Toomey and Julian Nagel’s production design, it gives the families’ circumstances a tidiness that we found a little too reassuring. That finish makes the programme easy to settle into, but it can also soften the discomfort of what it depicts. Spiro gets more convincing messiness from the actors.
Editors Chris Gill and Jamie Pearson give the campaign enough pace to sustain our interest, although the courtroom stretches are noticeably less involving. The script makes room for information at the expense of character in those passages. Sion Trefor’s score adds emotional encouragement we do not always need. With Whittaker and Wood already making the cost of this fight clear, the programme could afford to let us decide more often how to feel.
There is a reason British injustice dramas keep returning to people having to organise before they will be heard. The familiar shape can make a complicated case accessible, and Spiro uses it to keep the mothers in view. We only wish the series were less anxious to underline the lesson. Watch for Whittaker and Wood; patience with the explanatory passages will be repaid.
