"Just making it clear, Top Boy definitely does not glamorise or glorify what’s happening. It’s just a real representation of our world today," said one of the show's new cast members, rapper Little Simz (AKA Simbiatu Ajikawo), in a recent interview with the Guardian. It's a frightening admission – that the seemingly endless cycle of gang crime and youth violence that our country is currently is facing is as extreme as Top Boy often depicts – but it's not one that anyone who has ever seen a young child selling drugs outside a Tesco Express, heard sirens screech past their windows late at night or simply watched the news will be able to disagree with.
When it first landed on Channel 4 in 2011, Top Boy found success because it also found and served an audience whose stories had, up until then, only been told to the masses by damning headlines and YouGov statistics. For once, it showed people how and why gang crime often shapes the lives of people living in underprivileged areas and how challenging it can be to escape it. It was a means with which the wider public could understand and sympathise with the plight of these people, while also giving those who live in the real world of Top Boy the opportunity to feel heard. And then, after two series, it was cancelled.
Six years after the final episode of series two aired, Top Boy has now found its way back onto our screens via Netflix. The revival comes courtesy of the show's new executive producer, Drake, who according to the show's screenwriter, Ronan Bennett, wanted to get the show back up and running because "There is nothing else on television like it. It shows a world that is ignored." Series three, which lands on the streaming service on 13 September, also stars London rappers Dave (Modie) and Little Simz (Shelley), who join original cast members Ashley Walters (Dushane), Kano (Sully), Shone Romulus (Dris) and Ashley Thomas (Jermaine). Star-studded, but still grittier than ever, with a supporting cast of relatively unknown actors, while series three of Top Boy enjoys the support of big names in music, it does not sacrifice any of its integrity for it.
A lot has changed since Top Boy last aired in 2013 and the nastier aftereffects of the Brexit referendum, the Windrush scandal and the continued gentrification of areas such as London's Hackney, where the show is set, are all subtly explored in the new series. As Little Simz said, "it’s just a real representation of our world today." While the blood shed from gang crime remains shocking, particularly when innocent bystanders begin to get caught in the crossfire, it's the scenes that see asylum seekers become the target of violent, racist attacks and a mother being told she might be deported that this time hit the hardest. When the latter is told by her manager that the Home Office has contacted them to say they must terminate her employment, the conversation's sting is felt on both sides: "I'm so sorry," says the bearer of bad news repeatedly, powerless against the government to do anything that could help. Shortly after, the mother's son decides to start skipping school to help make her some extra money.
Top Boy is about street gangs and drug dealers, yes, but what the show has done so well since its inception is paint a picture of the world in which they operate, the injustices people within their community face on a daily basis, the odds that are stacked against them. At numerous points throughout the series, Kano's Sully notes how Jason – the now grown-up child we saw suffer at the hands of drug-addicted parents in series two – "ain't got no luck in life", but the truth is that no one on their fictional Summerhouse estate has good fortune on their side. Life is bleak and the circumstances in which people die – murder, drug abuse, inescapable poverty – are even bleaker. Luck is reserved for the middle classes, both Summerhouse's new drug suppliers and the hipsters who have set up artisan coffee shops in the area. This contrast becomes especially stark when one young boy goes round to his girlfriend's house to meet her parents: "You could have told me they were posh," he comments as they walk down her fairy-lit garden in a dreamlike sequence, worlds away from the concrete grey that frames his own life. "Sorry. Don't hold it against me," she replies, before explaining that her mother is an interior designer and her father is a surgeon. Both of the boy's parents are dead.
Dave and Little Simz both join the cast with such ease that you instantly forget their rap personas and believe their storylines as Modie, Sully's gang rival, and Shelley, the single-parent carer looking after Dushane's mother, in their entirety. Both performances are perhaps aided by the fact that they are all too familiar with tales that they're telling, Simz having grown up near where Top Boy is set, Dave having watched both of his brothers be sent to prison, one for robbery, the other for murder. In this respect, then, their casting feels less like a publicity stunt and more in tune with the way many roles in the series were street cast; they are just as much a part of the social fabric of Top Boy's world as previously unknown cast members such as Romulus, who was recruited while outside his block of flats in Hackney.
Against the backdrop of the highly publicised increase in youth violence, Top Boy now feels more urgent than ever before. The trouble is that those who would benefit from watching it the most – the politicians who believe that hashtags on chicken boxes are a reasonable solution to the problem – will probably choose to fill their spare time with something else. This would be a big mistake. Top Boy is perhaps one of the most accessible ways to understand that the youth violence problem is far too complex to be fixed by lazy marketing campaigns. It is also one of the only projects in mainstream media that gives the people impacted a voice. For once, we should all try to listen to them.
Read more
Little Simz on how the current curriculum is failing creatives
Dave is the game-changing British rapper set for superstardom
Kano on Made in the Manor, Damon Albarn and being vulnerable
