TV Pick of the Week: Toxic Town - review by Yvette Huddleston

Once a thriving town buoyed by the steel industry, Corby was a place of plentiful employment and opportunity; families came from all over Britain to find jobs in the steelworks. There was a significant Scottish community living there, having relocated from north of the border in search of work. Then along came Thatcher and the demise of heavy industry and manufacturing. Steelworks and coalmines were no longer major employers and as one by one they shut down, the communities around them suffered as a result. Corby was one such affected community. After the closure and demolition of the steelworks, there was a lengthy clean-up operation to prepare the site for redevelopment. It eventually transpired by the local council had cut corners and made some very bad decisions.

The narrative begins in 1995 with the clean-up in progress – lorries drive back and forth from the site through the centre of town, spilling nasty-looking liquids everywhere as they go. We meet two chalk-and-cheese women who get to know each other on a maternity ward. Susan McIntyre (Jodie Whittaker) is a feisty, outgoing Scot whose partner works at the site while shy, quiet Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou Wood) is an accountant at the firm leading the clean-up, who we first see leaving the office and having to clean thick red dust from her car before she can drive home. Both their babies are born with disabilities.

When McIntyre later discovers there are other women whose children have also been similarly affected, she assembles a campaigning group and hires compassionate lawyer Des Collins (Rory Kinnear) who promises to stick with them for as long as it takes. Whittaker and Wood are both outstanding in their roles and get solid support from a classy ensemble cast including Robert Carlyle as a principled councillor who dares to ask awkward questions of the council and Brendan Coyle as its unprincipled leader who is busy making dubious tender deals and burying reports that highlight serious concerns about the levels of poison in the soil.

The series serves as a fitting tribute to the group of parents who eventually got the justice they sought, winning their 2009 landmark legal case - the first to establish a link between toxic waste and birth defects.