Toxic Town, true story about toxic damage to children

Toxic Town is about a group of mothers in England’s East Midlands who gave birth to children with various limb deformities and other serious health issues. It’s a limited 4 part series on Netflix, based on real events.

Toxic Town begins with a couple of women together in a maternity ward. An outstanding Jodie Whittaker plays Susan, who gives birth to a boy with a deformed hand. The excellent Aimee Lou Wood has a little girl with multiple problems who doesn’t survive. Several years pass before these two women see each other again.

During the pregnancies, the men of the town were working at leveling an old steel mill and carting off all the toxic waste to a big hole just outside of town. They carried the waste in open dump trucks. Dust from the trucks speeding through town blew all over everything.

A young engineer named Ted (Stephen McMillan) tried to get the company doing the work to comply with safety standards. They put him off. He took it to Roy (Brendan Coyle), the head of the town council, who put him off, too. Ted decided to make copies of all the reports and hide them at his house. He was caught doing it by Sam (Robert Carlyle), a councilman, who was sympathetic to what he was doing. Sam couldn’t get Roy to do the right thing either, however.

When Susan’s son was already in school, he was having yet another surgery on his hand. She ran into Tracey outside the hospital. Their conversation led to Susan connecting their situations, as well as that of the local bartender (Karla Crome) who had a child with limb deformities. They started looking around for more cases and found many others, all born at around the same time the steel mill cleanup had been ongoing. One of them, Maggie (Claudia Jessie), was the wife of one of the men who drove the dump trucks (Joe Dempsie).

Susan, who was not really cut out to be a community organizer, became a community organizer. She found a lawyer, Des (Rory Kinnear), who agreed to help the mothers and their children.

There were years of work gathering information and evidence before the case could finally go to court. Susan’s son was a teenager when the case was finally heard. In one way or another, everyone I mentioned above played a part in the trial. It wasn’t a perfect result for all the mothers, but some of them got justice at last.

Minkie Spiro directed all four episodes of this drama written by Jack Thorne.

I haven’t seen Jodie Whittaker in much (not a Doctor Who fan) so I was absolutely blown away by how good she is. No wonder she’s famous. Aimee Lou Wood was also simply wonderful. And Brendan Coyle is just as good at being greedy and evil as he is at being a stodgy butler.

Stories like this always make he think of Erin Brockovich, which, by the way, you can also see on Netflix. Right now we need all the inspiring stories we can get about ordinary people stepping up to defy the greedy profiteers who don’t care who they hurt.