In normal times, 'Toxic Town' would have caused the kind of stir in Britain that ITV's 'Mr Bates versus The Post Office' achieved last year.
A tale of citizens rising up and fighting shocking malpractice in their Northamptonshire town, Jack Thorne's four part drama on Netflix is the kind of miniseries about real life trauma that British television does so well.
However just as it started to make some noise, 'Toxic Town' was drowned out by the chatter around another Jack Thorne scripted drama 'Adolescence'.
While the attention that miniseries has got is understandable, this other Thorne drama is worthy of our attention.
'Toxic Town' tells the story of residents in the former steelmaking town of Corby who took the local council to court in 2009 over toxic waste contamination following the discovery of a cluster of children born with physical deformities.
Like all good docudramas, it zeros in on a handful of families involved in the class action taken by 18 people who argued a cavalier approach to environmental pollution by council chiefs seeking to redevelop the steelworks was to blame.
In the miniseries, we see Jodie Whittaker's Susan McIntyre go through the pregnancy of her second son Connor with his father, Michael Socha's Pete and coming across Aimee Lou Wood's accountant Tracey Taylor in a maternity ward.
Both women's births, however, go horrifically wrong, with the doctors and nurses concerned about Connor's deformed hand.
Tracey's baby girl Shelby Anne is born with defects to her ear and heart and she dies very quickly.
Pete is unable to cope with Connor's disability and he abandons Susan's family pretty quickly, leaving her to do her best by their two boys.
Keeping the household afloat, she tries to rectify Connor's situation by pressing for surgery to build him a hand but it's a real struggle, with her son prone to infection.
Meanwhile Stephen McMillan's Corby Council employee Ted Jenkins is appalled at the blind eye being turned by colleagues to the shoddy practices that the contractor deploys as his firm clears the former steelworks site.
Uncovered lorries roll through Corby spreading dust across the town, contaminating the air and polluting the local waterways with muddy water.
Attempts are made to buy off Ted's silence as it becomes clear to him that senior council officials are taking bribes from Ben Batt's contractor Pat Miller to ignore the cut corners.
Made to feel a pariah for not taking bribes, Ted photocopies damning files that show the level of corruption which he eventually uses to prick the conscience of Robert Carlyle's councillor Sam Hagen who initially ignores concerns but then becomes increasingly concerned.
This makes him fall foul of the Labour council leader, Brendan Coyle's Roy Thomas.
With a Sunday Times journalist hovering around the story about the cluster of birth defects in Corby, Susan discovers Karla Crome's barmaid Pattie Walker has a child with a disability to Connor's.
Soon more mothers come forward including Tracey and Claudia Jessie's Maggie Mahon and they form an action group with Rory Kinnear's solicitor Des Collins taking up their case.
Thorne and director Minkie Spiro build a compelling story of environmental catastrophe and political corruption that will remind many viewers of 'Erin Brokovich'.
Like a lot of British TV docudramas, fuelled by a sense of injustice their show is well written and solidly directed but is mostly propelled by strong lead performances from Whitaker and Wood.
These are buttressed by excellent supporting performances from Carlyle, West, McMillan, Socha and Jessie.
Coyle and Batt also make wonderful villains - the former oozing big fish in a small pond pomposity and arrogance while the latter obnoxiously flaunts his ill gotten wealth like Loadsamoney.
One reason why 'Toxic Town' has probably been overshadowed by 'Adolescence' is the way it is directed.
Unlike 'Adolescence,' 'Toxic Town' is not as flashy technically.
It doesn't mesmerise audiences with bravura one take camera movements. It's much more traditional.
Yet the story it tells is very important - a fact that is rammed home in the final captions as the scale of contaminated land used for development in the UK is revealed.
And with Keir Starmer's Government determined to grow the economy and develop brownfield and green belt sites, British virwers may hope the lessons of what went wrong in Corby have been fully absorbed and guarded against.
(All four episodes of 'Toxic Town' was made available for streaming on Netflix in the UK and Ireland on February 27, 2025)
There's been quite a few articles in British newspapers in recent weeks about the crisis in the terrestrial television drama production.
With many dramas starting to land on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ that you might have expected to pop up on the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channels 4 and 5, the Guardian has reported in recent days that the media executive Elisabeth Murdoch has warned terrestrial television drama producers are struggling to raise the funding required to tell the breadth of stories they once used to.
The decision by BBC Scotland to axe its long running soap opera 'River City' has also sparked outrage and prompted further concerns that terrestrial TV drama is in a crisis that will inevitably impact the nurturing of filmmaking talent.
'Fear' is another example of a TV drama that you might have expected to surface on BBC Scotland or Channel 5 but has landed on Amazon Prime instead.
'Line of Duty' star Martin Compston plays Martyn, a working class architect made good who moves into a lovely new home in Glasgow with his wife Anjli Mohindra's Rebecca and their two kids.
Martyn has uneasy relationships with his gun obsessed, ex Paratrooper father, played by James Cosmo and his tattoo artist brother, played by Daniel Portman who thinks in his pursuit of an upper middle class life, he has started to look down on the rest of the family.
There's a sense also that in committing to a house in an affluent neighbourhood while chasing a commission to build a civic arts centre, Martyn may be overreaching.
As they move into their new home, Rebecca and Martyn are taken aback when Solly McLeod's shy neighbour in the basement apartment below, Jam leaves a gift of a box of biscuits and then later emerges to offer their kids freshly baked pizza.
Initially charmed by Jan, Rebecca starts to get unnerved when he makes a number of inappropriate comments about how she looks.
After Martyn confronts him about his behaviour, things start to spiral when their neighbour makes an accusation that the couple are abusing their children.
Viewers of a certain age will be reminded of John Schlesinger's taut, underrated 1990 thriller 'Pacific Heights' where Michael Keaton's shifty tenant psychologically torments Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith's San Francisco yuppies.
Mick Ford's Glasgow adaptation of German author Dirk Kurbjuweit's 2013 novel, however, isn't an exact copy of Schlesinger's film but some similar dynamics are at play.
However plodding exposition, a tendency towards preposterous narrative and a failure to dig deeper into significant plot points mean that the three part miniseries suffers in comparison.
In the second and third episodes, we hear an awful lot about children's services getting involved in the accusations that Jan levels against the couple, yet Ford and director Justin Chadwick don't seem up for dramatising any of this.
This may be because they have only three episodes to work with but ant stage the very serious spectre of child abuse is raised, the show seems to gloss over it.
Even more annoying is Jan's use of a toy robot to spy on the family above him.
As a plot device, it just strains credulity and the same is true with how the conflict between Jan, Rebecca and Martyn is resolved.
All of these flaws undermine the show and as a result, when the big twist eventually comes, you just don't care because 'Fear' simply hasn't built up enough credit to make you care.
Compston, Mohindra, McLeod, Cosmo struggle with a leaden script from Ford and Chadwick also struggles to breathe life into it.
Watching 'Fear,' you can't help feeling this is one script terrestrial TV chiefs will be relieved has landed elsewhere.
What would underwhelm on BBC1 or Channel 5 underwhelms on Amazon Prime.
Terrestrial commissioning chiefs are right to bemoan instead missing out on 'Slow Horses,' 'Adolescence' and 'Toxic Town'.
(All three episodes of 'Fear' were made available for streaming on Amazon Prime in the UK and Ireland on March 4, 2025)
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