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Top Boy writer Ronan Bennett: 'I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be a drug dealer after watching this'
There’s a scene in the new Top Boy – the East London gangland drama which ran for two seasons on Channel 4 between 2011 and 2013, now resurrected by Netflix – that sees a migrant woman walk down a street in Ramsgate. In shot is a boarded-up shop, against which are pinned a dozen or so England flags.
“I remember looking at it, and immediately called the crew,” says the show’s writer, 63-year-old Irish novelist Ronan Bennett, “to tell them it was too much. They’d overdone it. But they replied saying, ‘No Ronan, we didn’t dress that street. That’s real.’”
It’s been six years since Top Boy examined life on the fictional Summerhouse Estate in Hackney – ranked in 2010 as London’s most deprived borough – sensitively yet viscerally probing issues of class, race, knife crime and drugs through Summerhouse’s largely black community. Starring as drug barons Dushane and Sully were rappers Kane Robinson (Kano) and Ashley Walters (So Solid Crew), while Letitia Wright (later the star of Black Panther) played Chantelle. The show was revelatory: these stories – all real, lifted from interviews Bennett conducted with young men, women and children in Hackney – had never been told on primetime television so authentically before. Statistics and sensationalist newspaper headlines were humanised; inner-city London was given a beating heart.
In this season of Top Boy, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, the same key characters are back (alongside two starry new additions, UK rappers of the moment Dave and Little Simz) – dispiritingly where we left them, and, equally dispiritingly, the same themes apply. Knife crime has risen by 52 per cent in the last three years, and the city’s drug trade is ever more brazen. But London is also different. This is a post-Brexit London, where hate offences peaked at 1,630 in May. Gentrified, too, Hackney is now the city’s 11th most expensive borough.
“When I was writing the show two years ago, the Windrush scandal was happening, and deportation; gentrification came at a cost to those not enjoying skinny lattes and smashed avocado; there was the rise in knife crime, there was the beginnings of acid crime, police were struggling,” says Bennett, a Hackney resident of 25 years. He remembers getting burgled and the police simply telling him to ring his insurance company: “Before, someone would come round and take a statement. There was a sense that the police just couldn’t cope anymore.”
Bennett’s social commentary is subtle; it's clear he doesn't want to preach. For instance, when Dushane returns from Jamaica to find his go-to barber shop has been replaced by an artisan coffee shop, comically, we see his bafflement as the barista whips and froths his coffee to absurd lengths. Less comic is when a migrant couple receive bricks hurled through their window, or when a young boy’s efforts to help his mother financially after she loses her job ahead of deportation become worryingly criminal. Top Boy focuses on what the headlines don’t: the devastating chain of cause and effect that begins to snowball many years before its first casualty.
This is particularly evident with the season’s new top boy: Jamie, played by 21-year-old newcomer MichealWard and inspired by a Hackney resident whom Bennett met and interviewed for the show. As Sully and Dushane come together to run the borough once again with supplies coming from Jamaica, Jamie – desperately trying to provide for his two younger brothers after both their parents pass away from cancer – tries to take their spot. Jamie’s life is one of two halves: one night, he's at his brother’s parents' evening; the other, he’s kidnapping a member of an opposing gang. It’s a dichotomy that proves uncomfortable. How can we judge someone for whom a life of crime is not a choice? Who, it is clear, is simply trying to keep his family above water, to make sure his brothers go to school, to make sure they do the washing up, to make sure the rent is paid. Do the ends justify the means?
“What he’s doing is inexcusable to the world,” says Ward, eagerly settling into his very first major interview, “but when you see him behind closed doors you excuse him for everything even though you shouldn’t. But I think this is what the show was created for. You want people to realise there are other ways of making quick money. The problem is, we don’t learn about them at school. You just learn the curriculum, you play football. And if your parents don’t really know how things work, like my mum is from Jamaica, she couldn’t really guide me. And then you lose your way; you start doing dumb things.”
Ward, who lost his own father when he was two, identified with Jamie’s role as man of the house. “There were times when we didn’t have certain things growing up. I had to step up for my mum. I’ve been thinking about my dad a lot recently, now that I’m doing so well and I wish he could see it.”
Ward came from Jamaica as a child, living in Romford and then Hackney. He has been a fan of the show since he was 14. “It would be the topic of conversation at school for the entire week,” he grins. “That and [2006 film] Kidulthood made me think, rah, there are actually mainstream stories about people like us. It was the first time I’d seen something of my world on TV. The show really opened doors for me.” Ward will soon star in an as-yet-unannounced BBC drama with a very well known director.
Does he worry, as a young black man playing a "street" drama, that he might be typecast? “Nah, that’s never going to be a thing for me,” he says breezily, mentioning he cut his teeth at a local Shakespeare drama club. “I’m versatile. I can change the way I speak.”
Ward’s only concern is that viewers will think the show is glamourising lives of violence and crime. He references the scene where Jamie splashes out on an expensive watch, and the car he drives. “That would mad upset me you know,” he says, frowning for the first time in our conversation. “Jamie might have nice clothes, but we’re showing families breaking down. People breaking down. It is not worth it.”
Bennett, however, has no such concern. “I don’t worry about it being controversial at all. I can’t imagine anyone watching Top Boy and thinking, ‘I want to be a drug dealer’.” Bennett has also mostly avoided another controversy: outrage that an old, white Irishman could write about a black community in East London. Bennett credits his previous work as a historian for being able to enter a world that wasn’t his own. “I knew how to gather material, and how to use it,” he says, explaining that he would allow the cast to rewrite lines if they felt the language felt too removed from them.
Bennett also has a personal connection to the story that is a powerful reminder that the show is for all audiences. Family is truly at the show’s core. “At the end of season two,” says Bennett, “my wife died, and my kids and I became a little unit. And then when my kids watched the episodes, they said, ‘Dad, you’ve made our family black!’ They saw me as a much older, whiter version of Jamie.”
The only reason we’re seeing this new season of Top Boy at all, of course, is because of rap star Drake, who met with Bennett at London’s Rosewood hotel two years ago, along with rapper Future, to give Top Boy their support after Channel 4 dropped the show. Bennett had never heard of Drake – who premiered the season’s trailer at his O2 shows in April – until the meeting. “But he didn’t throw his weight around, he was very humble,” he says, adding that Drake had no financial involvement in the series, and did not – as many earlier reports claimed – buy the rights to Top Boy. He has also had no creative involvement. “Drake is first and foremost a fan,” says Bennett. “In fact, I think what he said was, ‘We want to add gasoline to your fire’”.
Season three of Top Boy is available on Netflix now