Bafta was right: Top Boy is the best British drama in years

Top Guys: Sally and Dushane by Kane Robinson and Ashley Walters Photo: Chris Harris

What, not Happy Valley? Many watching the Bafta TV awards on Sunday night were expecting Sally Wainwright's epic cop show to take home the prize for best drama series. The audience waited seven long years for the finale, which lived up to all expectations. But no, Top Boy became the winner – also deservedly so.

As it happens, the climax of Top Boy also took some time. The London crime drama began back in 2011 but was canceled by Channel 4 after two seasons. It was rapper Drake, whose interest in continuing the story as an executive producer, brought the show to Netflix in 2019 after a six-year hiatus. There were three more seasons in total, one of them was postponed due to Covid-19.

Top Boy made its final visit to the Summerhouse estate in Hackney last autumn, presenting six powerful episodes that retained the high level of unritualized, unstylized and unglamorized violence that had defined this portrait of London's drug trade from the outset. Watching him kill, of which there were too many to count, was never fun. In Season 5, one DNA-rich crime scene turned the bright white kitchen dark red. Perhaps the darkest example of Grand Guignol was the discovery of a box with many flies and the severed head of a Moroccan in a secret compartment in the back of a truck.

Top Boy was not just a bloodbath, but a portrait of community. The idea came to Ronan Bennett, who wrote all but six of the 32 episodes while he had been living in Hackney for a couple of decades. While shopping, he noticed a boy, approximately 12 years old, selling drugs outside a supermarket. This boy, left alone by the police, was his route into a vast and completely normalized street trade from which there seemed to be no escape for those caught up in it.

“The main impression I get is one of weariness and sadness, as if they sense the futility of what they are involved in,” Bennett wrote in 2011. «They're living a life they don't like, but they don't know how to do it.» get out of here.»

By the final season, Summerhouse's two main drug lords seemed to have reached a truce. Dushane (Ashley Walters) allowed himself to be pushed aside by the thinner, hungrier Sally (Kane Robinson). Dushane then discovered that his millions had disappeared just as Sally's supply of drugs was stolen, setting them both on the path to the end.

The unique value of Top Boy is that while it provided thrills, it shed light directly on the lives of a section of society that had been largely ignored by playwrights. Other shows had drug dealers hanging around the edges. Here they have captured the center of the screen.

Many of the dilemmas they worked through may have been familiar from Italian and American crime dramas — the inviolable law of omerta, the moral choices forced upon gangster girlfriends, the capture of children as foot soldiers. Bennett didn't forget his Belfast roots when he introduced the happy-go-lucky Irish gangster, played in a cameo role by Barry Keoghan to a brutal end.

But at the beginning, as at the end, Top Boy's was steeped in London lore; in particular those areas increasingly affected by gentrification and the Windrush scandal. Yes, it was a modern city, but its ending hinted at its indebtedness to London's oldest and most famous underworld drama of all. When Dushane fled from the police through Summerhill in disorder, all escape routes were blocked and he resembled a modern-day Bill Sykes. Sally also died as suddenly as Fagin.

Star turn: Jasmine Jobson, who won a Bafta for her role as Jacques, may get a spin-off of the series Top Boy. Photo: Reuters

We won't see these two best guys again. However, there is news about a possible spin-off of Jacques Sally's ADC. Jasmine Jobson, who played her, won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress for the third time, behind Harriet Walter in Hereditary, Siobhan Finneran in Happy Valley, and Lesley Manville and Elizabeth Debicki in The Crown.

There was a lot of interesting things in all these speeches. The deciding factor must have been Jacques's visit to Damascus after her sister's fatal drug overdose. The journey required Jobson to go from ruthless to heartbroken and vulnerable. The victory was a personal triumph for Jobson, but also a testament to the vital role the arts can play in helping to save the difficult lives of young people. As a child, Jobson more or less placed herself in foster care, asking social services to separate her from her mother. She didn't have to act when she was asked to get angry at the audition, she picked up a chair and threw it across the room.

The only thing that worries Jacques about the new series is that she refused to trade. Bennett will have to find something else for her.

Top Boy is available on Netflix