'Telly is like a dinner party where I don't have to talk'

Bafta-winning writer Jack Thorne discusses why he loves TV so much, and his new drama ‘Toxic Town’, with Gabriel Tate

- Gabriel Tate

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 Yewtreeadjacent 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