If television is, as Jack Thorne described it in his 2021 MacTaggart lecture, “an empathy box”, then he is unquestionably one of its most empathetic contributors and a writer who feels his responsibilities keenly. This is equally true of the semi-fictional realms of National Treasure, his Yewtree-adjacent exposé of TV’s sexual predators, or Help, his polemic against the sacrifice of care homes during Covid and “the only thing I’ve ever written with real rage”, or his latest, a Netflix four-parter about the UK’s biggest case of child poisoning since Thalidomide.
Toxic Town tells the story of a group of Corby mothers including Susan McIntyre (Jodie Whittaker), Tracey Taylor (Aimee Lou Wood) and Maggie Mahon (Claudia Jessie). Aided by local solicitor Des Collins (Rory Kinnear) and whistleblower Sam Hagen (Robert Carlyle), they took the Labour-run council to court to prove the link between the dust created during the reclamation of a shuttered British Steel works between 1984 and 1999, and the disproportionately high numbers of children born with limb difference over that period.
Talking over Zoom from his north London home, Thorne is thoughtful, funny, self-effacing and diligent (he follows up over email to clarify a couple of answers he worried – unnecessarily – were garbled or poorly phrased) and was surely the only choice to write this; an absolutely engrossing, moving and witty slice of social commentary with a big, beating heart.
Like virtually everyone involved in the show, he also had no idea about the case until he was approached by executive producer Annabel Jones. With the exception of a dogged Sunday Times journalist, it made few headlines at the time and only a 2020 Horizon documentary has revisited it since the verdict in 2009; an extraordinary state of affairs for both a landmark legal case and a compelling human-interest story. Indeed, he declares himself both “incredibly moved and incredibly jealous” about the impact of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, one of the finest examples of an underreported outrage given fresh impetus by TV drama.
“For the mothers, making this show was about them feeling people hadn’t paid attention, because working-class disabled kids aren’t high on anyone’s agenda,” Thorne explains. “No one said this case was going to be won, yet they pursued it for years when others would have crumbled, trying to keep a roof over their families’ heads while their kids were in and out of hospital, in terrible pain.”
This story doesn’t want for heroes: Susan is a dauntless, filterless force of nature; Tracey the quiet, grieving mum stepping up even after unthinkable betrayal; Maggie is torn between her child and the husband (Joe Dempsie) who, as a site contractor, would risk his family’s livelihood by speaking out. Real villains, though, are harder to find. Corby council’s leadership (represented, for legal reasons, by Brendan Coyle’s fictional Roy Thomas), reeling from the influx of 11,000 newly unemployed in a town of 50,000 after the plant’s closure, prioritised regeneration and jobs lest their town meet the same grim fate as many mining communities. While their reasoning is given a fair hearing, waste (and its disposal) was clearly a secondary consideration, if it was considered at all.
Worryingly, similar errors of judgement loom under the current Labour government, talking of slashing regulations and prioritising growth – a potentially calamitous trade-off of prosperity against public health put into sharpest focus by water companies dumping sewage into our rivers and seas.
“Red tape and planning laws are what protect us,” argues Thorne. “With the waterways, what was supposed to be an emergency measure is now part of the economic model. In Toxic Town, the idea that children are disabled, in pain or died because of the air they breathed, in a supposedly developed country, is astonishing. We’re about to get into a huge thing with the AI revolution and the modular power stations that could fuel it – but at what cost? I hope there’s some analysis going on into the true cost of waste, but it doesn’t feel like a particular concern to Rachel Reeves. I’m still a Labour Party member and really believe in the cause. I just hope someone’s asking the right questions.”
Born in Bristol and raised in Newbury during the bypass protests, Thorne was taught to question everything. “I became the Young Labour officer for Newbury constituency party and we’d have meetings about where we stood on this or that. My dad’s a town planner and the only person alive who would say, in all honesty, they love a committee meeting. It’s what defines people like Sam Hagen and my dad, people who put the public good first and don’t worry about being disliked. That constant call to action and civic duty never left me.”
It was at university that Thorne discovered his vocation after ditching early thoughts of politics and acting. Instead, he turned to writing and hasn’t ever really stopped, describing it as “almost a psychological dependency”. It was also here that he developed a chronic condition called cholinergic urticaria that left him bed-bound and allergic to his own body heat. He was later diagnosed with autism after a listener to his Desert Island Discs episode suggested it was worth consideration, and is now perhaps television’s foremost champion of disability and representation both on and off camera.
Aside from his many high-profile projects addressing the issue, Thorne launched the TV Access Project (TAP) in 2022, aimed at “full inclusion for disabled people working in TV by 2030” and in part prompted by the Covid response suggesting “we decided as a society that we could divide deaths in two”. Thorne declares himself delighted with the progress made.
“Statistics and behaviours on set are improving,” he says. “Conversations are happening at really high levels [10 major broadcasters and streamers have so far signed up] about access to work, and the wording around studios is that broadcasters will only work with TAP-audited production spaces. We’re very, very proud of that.”
Parenthood is another leitmotif of his work and indeed our conversation, which spans vomit, puberty and secondary schools. I tell him that, since becoming a father, I find programmes about children in pain (or worse) almost unbearably hard to watch, yet his work in the eight years since he and his wife Rachel had their son Elliott has included not only Toxic Town but The Accident (children are killed in an industrial accident) and Best Interests (parents disagree over removing life support from their terminally ill daughter). How does he rationalise that?
“There are times when Elliott gets a tighter hug at the end of a day of writing,” he says. “Being a dad is the most remarkable thing that ever happened to me, understanding that sort of love… I can’t stop writing about it, because those feelings are so different to how I expected my life to be, and because I can’t stop thinking about him.”
Thorne caters for younger audiences as adeptly as older ones. Big franchise tilts include the BBC’s His Dark Materials and Netflix’s Enola Holmes films on screen, and spin-offs of Stranger Things and Harry Potter on stage. While he understandably demurs about discussing JK Rowling’s baleful online presence (“it just leads to too many problems”), he is proud of smuggling chewy issues into his most defiantly mainstream work.
“Is my job to tell Enola Holmes stories, or gritty four-parters?” he ponders. “The Enola Holmes films reach 75, 80 million people. They’re films without any political drive, but with the second one we told the story of the match girls’ strike and the importance of collective action. Whereas we really believed in Best Interests, but it didn’t have the impact we wanted because I think a lot of people went: ‘Oh, that sounds really good, I don’t want to watch it.’ That was hard, but it made me think a lot about my writing, what I want to do and how I want to do it. I think Toxic Town is more joyful. We’re not looking at pain exclusively, but at resilience and survival.”
Toxic Town is an intriguing choice for Netflix and, Thorne argues, a heartening example of the streamer making a local show they anticipate will travel. But his take on the TV landscape is one of depressing conservatism. “I think the domestic industry is in panic. Questions of what will sell and bring an audience are being asked way too early. We are too reliant on true crime and existing IP and, while I’m able to work a path through that, it’s people that don’t have a career who are walking into a shitpit. Lots of people in our industry aren’t telling the stories they want to, and that’s really troubling.”
Thorne hates the word “prolific” and confesses to sleepless nights worrying about “stealing other people’s thunder”, but in truth his work demonstrates the variety and potential of television drama as social commentary, inspiring and creating space for others. Upcoming projects include Adolescence, a one-shot four-part Netflix drama on knife crime and masculinity, the BBC’s adaptation of Lord of the Flies, and Liverpool, a BBC series on Bill Shankly and the symbiosis between football and the city. Projects on the phone-hacking scandal (for ITV) and a love story rooted in faith (for Channel 4) were announced within days of our conversation, confirming the respect he commands across the board.
Not bad for a man who, on Desert Island Discs, declared: “I don’t quite know how other people work. I’m constantly sort of on the outside, looking at them and going: ‘I understand how you’re talking, I understand why you’re talking, but I don’t quite know how to get involved in the conversation’.”
How does a garlanded master of the “empathy box” (five Baftas and counting) square this with his precise, emotionally perceptive dialogue and character writing?
“The wearing of masks is where autism made sense to me, because working out what mask I need to wear to make you think I’m OK is exhausting,” he says. “My ideal dinner party would be a load of people sat in another room, and I can just listen. That’s why I love telly so much, because it’s like you’re having dinner with people, but you don’t have to be the one that talks. None of it means I don’t love people, because I do. I admire what they’re capable of.”
‘Toxic Town’ launches on Netflix on Thursday 27 February. ‘Adolescence’ follows on 13 March
