📺 Watched Toxic Town.
This mini-series was also written by Jack Thorne, the same person who co-wrote another recent highly impactful show I watched, Adolescence.
Unlike the latter (despite what some largely offensive people like to claim about Adolescence), this series is based on a single, specific true event. One I hadn’t heard of, to my shame.
In 1981, the owners of a steel-making industrial site in the UK town of Corby closed it down. The relevant council decided to demolish and re-excavate the site as part of an urban regeneration program.
Shortly afterwards pregnant people in the area started having babies that suffered from birth defects at a weirdly high level. Some had miscarriages.
Each in isolation has no way to know that this is anything more than a rare and potentially personally devastating outcome for them, their family and of course their child. But once they start to learn of each other’s situations they come to the conclusion that something more than bad luck is going on in the area; eventually settling on the idea that what happened to them must relate to the mismanagement of the shutdown of the steel plant and the resulting very visible chemical contamination of the area.
They end up taking the council to court. The council fervently denies the allegations, disputes their evidence and tries to come up with some of their own. However, they do so dishonestly, prioritising blanket denial, and their own financial interests, over the suffering of the claimants. It’s hard to say it’s anything other than a deliberate cover-up, rife with corruption.
This dramatized documentary then tells the story of a few of the women involved, from the traumatic start of their plight through to their attempts to win some kind of legal justice for their children - no matter how hard the struggle became, no matter the toll the fight inevitably took on them and their families.
