Last night, to the apparent dismay of some, the hit TV show Top Boy won the coveted Bafta award for best drama series. This was not supposed to happen. There was huge expectation that shows depicting a mainstream (read: white) version of life, such as Succession, The Crown and Happy Valley would sweep up.
The grumbling was immediate. “The Baftas were more self-congratulation by a TV class obsessed with race, identity and bleakness,” read a headline in the Daily Telegraph. Oh, God. “Top Boy is a great series,” the piece continues, “But, as ever, there’s something dizzying about high-end TV people and their peculiar obsession with the opposite corner of society. It’s all dressed up with social conscience and concern, but there’s a whiff of ‘slumming it’.” Based on a fictional Hackney housing estate called Summerhouse, Top Boy unflinchingly confronts grim, urgent social issues. While shows such as The Crown depict the power and opulence of the British monarchy, Top Boy offers a starkly different perspective on the nation, chronicling harsh realities of poverty, drug dealing and violence on our cities’ streets – and it appears that not everyone is happy about that.
As unlikely and contentious as it may be for a show like Top Boy to have come out on top at the Baftas, its success should not surprise anyone. It certainly hasn’t surprised me. It’s not just that Top Boy is gripping TV, dynamically soundtracked by Black British music, and providing crucial representation for young people from Black and diverse ethnic backgrounds. It’s also grippingly true to life – so true, in fact, that in my work as a youth violence intervention practitioner, I’ve used excerpts from the show in my sessions in schools and prisons to prompt discussion. We’ve examined moments where vans and Swat teams swamp estates as entryways to conversations about over-policing, and depictions of queerness in the show to discuss societal expectations around gender and sexuality.
Top Boy has provided crucial representation for young Black Britons like myself. The series is raw in its approach, real (as far as TV goes), and has proved relatable to those of us from inner-city environments of deprivation with experiences of crime. Where discourse around housing estates was once fuelled by problematic programmes such as Little Britain, Top Boy offers a more nuanced, humanising insight into working-class lives, which too often have been offensively caricatured. While London’s Hackney is known today as a trendy neighbourhood with cute coffee shops and pricey properties, Top Boy explores the hardships faced by the socially marginalised and economically underprivileged and examines the context within which difficult choices are made.
Although there have been some criticisms about the overuse of slang in its script that make it verge on inauthenticity, its scripting and casting have also been top notch. In a standout acting debut, Kane Robinson (AKA celebrated British rapper Kano) delivers a stellar performance, embodying the troubled character Sully, who struggles in a battle between ego and self doubt. The lasting, multidisciplinary careers of its cast have paved the way for a new generation of talent: Little Simz and Dave, for example, have both had supporting roles in Top Boy.
And its characters are complex – take Jaq, portrayed by Jasmine Jobson, who picked up the Bafta for best supporting actress. Her character subverts stereotypes and demonstrates the different experiences of women involved in or affected by street crime. In dramas that follow what it is like to be Black and working class, it certainly wasn’t the easy narrative choice. In my own work, I’ve observed how the struggles of young women are often eclipsed as we obsessively worry about boys.
The reception to Top Boy was lukewarm when it first came out in 2011, as some commentators thought it was just another drama glorifying guns. I wrote then that this amounted to little more than hysteria around a show that realistically depicts what life is like for some people in Britain, calling Top Boy “the real deal”. That is still true today – and if commentators can’t see that, it says more about them than it does about the show.
Franklyn Addo is a youth worker, journalist and rapper from Hackney, London
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