Doctor Who's Jodie Whittaker to star in new Netflix drama on Corby poisonings

Netflix has announced the cast for Toxic Town, a drama about the Corby poisonings scandal that rocked the UK back in 2009.

The four-part limited series will star Doctor Who's Jodie Whittaker, Sex Education's Aimee Lou Wood, The Full Monty's Robert Carlyle, Our Flag Means Death's Rory Kinnear, and Downton Abbey's Brendan Coyle.

Enola Holmes and His Dark Materials writer Jack Thorne has penned the script for this one.

Related: All 13 series of Doctor Who, ranked - from 2005 to 2021

The Corby poisonings actually refers to toxic waste. The Northamptonshire town was home to a steelworks that was closed in the early 1980s, but not before a huge amount of toxic waste had been deposited there.

Corby Borough Council spent over a decade removing the waste in an effort to develop the former steelworks site, but that involved transporting the waste through populated areas in open lorries.

In a landmark case, it was eventually proven that the environmental damage caused by the way the waste was moved led to birth defects, with a way-above-average number of people in Corby born with upper-limb defects.

The Council was found to be negligent in the case, which was also the first one to prove a link between toxic pollution in the environment and birth defects.

Related: Ncuti Gatwa says Sex Education "wasn’t always a joyous" experience

The drama will follow the legal battle between the parents of affected children and the Council and will begin filming imminently as it is made in the UK under the actors' union Equity rather than the Hollywood-based actor and writer unions that are currently striking.

Since leaving Doctor Who, Whittaker has been cast in Australian thriller One Night, and the second series of prison drama Time.

Toxic Town is yet to receive a release window. Doctor Who returns later in 2023 on BBC One in the UK and Disney+ elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the US, the show airs on BBC America, with series 1-12 available on Max.

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