Top Boy is back on our screens, as the Summerhouse roadmen ready their food for another round of Netflix's hit show - and there's a link to Belfast that may have passed by unnoticed.
Creator of the show - screenwriter and novelist Ronan Bennett - sat down with Belfast Live to explain how the foundations of the show lay in his own roots in Belfast. Bennett lives in Hackney with his two children but retains the softly-spoken Belfast brogue of his youth.
Living abroad does strange things to one's identity - one can feel further and closer from your home place than ever before. He explains how his relationship with nationality and place has morphed over the decades he has been out of the north.
"I've spent more than two-thirds of my life out of Ireland. It remains central. I follow the news there, north and south. It is crucial to identity. I don't want to be one of those emigrants who has been away for so long that they get misty-eyed, nostalgic and romantic. I've got no use for that.
"But I think about it a lot, I read about it a lot and talk to friends there."
Relations with the island on both sides of the border remain strong among Bennetts junior, Molly and Finn. Both have Irish passports, and the former is completing her studies at Trinity College. He is clear that any writing projects - both Top Boy and his other works - cannot fail to influenced by his time in Belfast and the north.
"What you've imbibed in your formative years is absolutely crucial to the way you think about the world and it is crucial to the things that you are interested in. The creator of Bridgerton, say, has their thing that they are interested in. It's not my thing - and I'm not criticising it at all - but we all have our own things.
"That 'thing' surely comes from the experiences of our formative years - the things that really stick in our minds and never goes away."
Bennett's formative years formed a clear template for identifying injustice, and not standing idly by. It comes out in his work. Top Boy is less a judgmental treatise as it is a multi-faceted portrayal of a world where characters' problems are similar but unique. The viewer implores intervention in young lives whose promise is funnelled down an increasingly-bleak road.
It was a very specific incident - seeing a young boy dealing drugs outside his local supermarket - that prompted Bennett to engage with community leaders like Gerry Jackson to understand more about 'road' life. These conversations led to the interviews with 'roadmen' that formed the basis of the series.
This is the product of a writer whose gaze remained transfixed when others would have chosen to look away, or not look at all.
"Seeing that kid outside the supermarket selling drugs - I didn't just see a kid selling drugs, what I saw was a world, a context. I thought 'how could this happen just around the corner from a very nice where me and my neighbours live?' But you have to have the curiosity to want to explore that more, otherwise you will just walk past. A different writer picks something else that they see further down the street."
Many shows lean too hard into the grit, which can turn off viewers who are often looking some escapism alongside their entertainment. It's a funny show too, with cutting lines throughout - something that should be familiar to a Northern Irish audience.
"There's a type of black humour in the north that I love to go back and get a refresher course in. Some years ago, I was sat at a bar in Shipquay Street in Derry. It was a busy bar and there was a young couple in there. The fella kept turning to the girl and said 'Were you faithful? Were you faithful?' Over the course of the hour he must have asked her three times.
"After about an hour, she put her glass down and says: 'You were in prison!" - and he said 'yes, for three months!'
"It stuck with me as a quintessential Derry exchange."
Since it first left his pen well over a decade ago, the series has gone through its share of ups and downs. Rejected by the BBC initially, picked up by Channel 4 for the first two series (now know as 'Top Boy: Summerhouse) - its cancellation there allowed a reinvigoration by Netflix.
It was driven by an unlikely interlocutor - hip-hop superstar, Drake - who wanted to come aboard and pitch to Netflix.
"[It was nice getting] a call and saying to my two kids: "I've got to go and meet someone called Drake..'
"He's a very nice man. I've only met him six or seven times in all but he's always been very modest and approachable. The young cast completely love him and he was very good with them - he made time for them. I wasn't sure at all who I was going to meet that first time. I'm sure he's a little amused that I'd never heard of him!"
With neither man under illusion or preconception about the other, it set things up for the start of a professional relationship that has taken Top Boy to a new level, in this Netflix iteration. Keen viewers of the four series in total will notice not only a higher production finish to the newer series, but a very definite change for the better to the soundtrack, too.
While Bennett is keen to explain that the success of the series has 'dozens' of fathers - not least the actors - it appears that Drake can take some credit in his area of expertise.
"He and his manager, Future, were not being big shots. They just said to us 'we want to add fuel to your fire.'
The length of the project has meant that life's ups and downs have intersected along the way to lend it special significance to Bennett. Above all else, the loss of his wife and the children's mother Georgina in 2014 rocked the family in the way that such things do.
Rather beautifully, he managed to turn a family's loss into a poignant gain for the viewer.
"The scene with the brothers in Netflix season one, [Jamie's family] are on a park bench - it's filmed in Victoria Park, a stone's throw from where I live.
"My wife had just given birth to our daughter, Molly, in 2001. We went to the park. It was a beautiful day and Molly was only a few hours old. Georgina was very strong and resilient, she was up and out of her hospital bed almost immediately. It was a stunning day. We were there with our son, Finn, and our daughter and it was just great.
"When Georgina died 13 years later, I remembered that event and I took the kids down there on her birthday and we celebrated her birthday. We sat on the same bench and talked about her. When I had the idea for Jamie being orphaned and looking after his two brothers - you have to dramatise that.
"A screenwriter never likes just to have characters sitting around talking. What you want to do is externalise it. Create a little bit of drama. So I put them in that park and say hello to their mother."
One can expect the influences of the north to resonate long into season three, as he explains.
"The 'No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs' line was very much in my head when I was thinking about Top Boy, and how I continue to think about it. I came from a community that was demonised - the Irish nationalist community in the north. It was demonised. It was shut out. There was discrimination.
"When I came to London, you look around and you see that these people - the black and brown community - are equally treated as an object of suspicion. They were 'other', they were different. It took me two minutes to make that comparison.
"At the premiere we had for this season of Top Boy, I was on stage introducing the films and I said exactly that. It was that infamous poster of 'No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs' was something that inspired me.
"I also cited Phil Lynott with his t-shirt 'More Blacks, More Irish, More dogs' and everybody there understood that."
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