Watch TV with Paul Flynn
THERE IS AN especially wry set-piece in the second episode of Top Boy, the East End drugs and gangs drama which returns this week after a five-year absence. Former Summerhall Estate kingpin Dushane (Ashley Walters) has returned to his old neighbourhood after an enforced sabbatical in Jamaica. Everything’s changed. He happens upon a fancy Hackney coffee shop. The barista tells him that customers queue around the block for his advanced blends every Saturday. Dushane sighs. Stimulants are everywhere. Same as it ever was. When it lived for two brief, incendiary seasons in the early half of this decade, Top Boy felt several steps ahead of its game. Now, its primary concerns – institutional racism, gangland violence and the astringent hit that black British youth culture took as the penalty for careless government austerity – are top of the capital’s news agenda. What Top Boy always brought to this material was an unsentimental, colourful, verité cinematic pulse, often just by pinpointing the domestic mundanity of the characters’ lives. That flavour continues in the exceptional new reboot, executive produced by Top Boy fan Drake. Watching the fly tension on a basketball forecourt, the hopeful look of a man tucking his young brother in to bed, the simple instruction ‘brush your teeth’. These incidentals are the meat and bones of Top Boy, the sketches that pepper an otherwise unflinching look at how this bleakly tenacious professional subculture was allowed to blossom. There’s been a massive recent upswing in casual cocaine use on TV. Everyone’s at it. The crafty line has replaced the vase-sized glass of Malbec as an easy character signifier. Top Boy’s purpose is to carefully peel back the chaotic, unstructured realities of estate lives wasted while facilitating mostly middle-class habits. In season three, the point is made bluntly by intertwining the methods of distribution and access to coke across class, race and creed. What results is an exposing, educational work of credible social significance. After Euphoria, Top Boy secures Drake as the TV exec to catch up with in the 2020s, just as he has been so effortlessly with music during the 2010s. For more reasons than one, let’s hope Michael Gove gets to see it.