Tyrone Rashard had just left prison when the first series of Top Boy launched on Channel 4. “I was totally mesmerised by it,” the 47-year-old says. He had served an 18-month sentence in HMP Pentonville for money laundering and was watching the show in his mother’s house in east London, where the show is set. “I understood the characters and the world so well. It was my world. It was my home.”
Since its launch in 2011, the brutal and vivid drama about the lives of drug dealers has been lauded as the British equivalent of The Wire. In 2019 it shot straight to the top of the most-watched shows on Netflix in the UK in its first week.
The new series follows the drug route into London from Morocco through Spain, but the show hasn’t lost its roots — Hackney is still the star. David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, called it a “must-watch”, and other admirers of the series include Noel Gallagher and the Canadian rapper Drake, who bought the rights and resurrected the show for Netflix six years after it was axed by Channel 4.
However, its portrayal of gang crime has also been criticised for glamorising violence and perpetuating negative stereotypes about Black British life. “Top Boy is a step back for Black British culture. There’s more to us than grime, gangs and knife crime,” said London Hughes, a comedian. Hackney council did not allow filming on its estates for the first series, although it has since changed its mind. Jules Pipe, a former mayor of Hackney, said that he did not want “their neighbourhood stigmatised on national television as riddled with drugs and gangs”.
Last year recorded the highest number of teenagers murdered in the capital since 2008, with 30 killings. The release of the show on Netflix is also a week after a 17-year-old boy was shot dead early in the afternoon in Hackney.
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The team behind Top Boy argue that they are just showing things as they are. The series, which stars the rapper Kano and Ashley Walters (who spent 18 months in prison on a firearm offence in 2001), stands out among gang dramas because it hired people from the streets it was filming to advise on the plot. Rashard is now one of those advisers.
“As soon as I saw the series I knew I had stories to tell,” Rashard says. He taught himself how to write scripts and got in touch with Top Boy’s creator, the novelist Ronan Bennett, asking if he could be involved. First of all he advised on the show’s street slang — “food” (drugs), “making paper” (money) and “the feds” (police). Now he has worked his way up and assisted on writing episodes for this series. Rashard says it helped him avoid the “trap of criminality” into which he had fallen before.
“I started making suggestions from my own experience,” he says, drawing on his knowledge of gang violence and the times he had faced police stop and searches. “Around 95 per cent of the stories in the show are derived from real situations.”
Bennett also spent time in prison. Aged 18 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of an RUC officer, Bill Elliott, and served 18 months in Long Kesh before his conviction was overturned on appeal. For Top Boy he spent two years interviewing gang members in east London, where he has lived for more than 20 years.
● Ashley Walters interview: So Solid Crew to Top Boy
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He also made sure that the show cast actors from the community it represents. As well as launching the careers of the Black Panther star Letitia Wright, the I May Destroy You creator Michaela Coel and the Brit award-winning rappers Dave and Little Simz, the show has held open castings for children who have never acted before. It earned Des Hamilton the first Bafta for casting when this category was introduced.
“We’re not glamorising anything. We are just telling the truth,” Rashard says. “We never sit down and think, ‘Let’s glorify this, let’s glamorise that.’ We highlight true-to-life stories and touch it up with a bit of entertainment.”
Little Simz has also rejected accusations of glamorisation: “People need to wake up. It’s real life, this happens every day. Whether or not it’s in your world because you’re so far removed, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
“You can’t hide behind a smokescreen and say this is not happening either,” adds Gerry Jackson, 60, the series’ story consultant, who grew up in Hackney and has seen it all: stabbings, shootings, friends who have gone to prison. “It is dangerous out there and people have to see it.
“The hope is that people will see this series and think that they don’t want their kids getting involved in violence and gangs and then perhaps pay more attention to them,” Jackson continues. Is there a hope that politicians will pay attention too? “People like the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, need to think about where these kids have to go after school. Kids want to be outside, out of the house. But where do they go? They have to join in with the gangs.”
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The drama tries to show different aspects of Hackney, Rashard says. A case in point is a trio of brothers, loosely based on real people who live in Hackney: the elder brother is the leader of the London Fields gang, played by Michael Ward, who won the Bafta rising star award in 2020, the middle brother is trying to be studious, while the youngest brother is stuck somewhere between the two. “Not everyone in Hackney is a drug dealer and we try to put that across,” Rashard says. “There are young black people making the right decisions in life.”
Both Rashard and Jackson say that the series has been popular with residents on Hackney’s estates, with the real-life Number One Cafe, where the show’s drug lords discuss their dealings, becoming a tourist destination. But would Rashard let his teenage son watch the series? “Am I going to turn on violent shows for my son to watch? Not particularly. But this series shows real-life situations and things that do happen in the area. I do want my son to understand the realities of life.”
The new series of Top Boy is on Netflix
