Other grime MCs, including Scorcher and Bashy, also featured before going on to get parts in films. It proved to be a hothouse of young black British talent: Michaela Coel had a bit-part in the original series, as did a pre-Black Panther Letitia Wright, who stood out as an ethically compromised young gang member. It became a touchstone in the music world, with such grime acts as Skepta working references into his Mercury prize-winning album, Konnichiwa. Both Robinson and Walters were asked about it incessantly as it began to find another audience, first on DVD and then on Netflix. “It looked like it was a non-starter.”īut despite the cancellation, Top Boy didn’t disappear completely.
“I didn’t ever think it was going to come back,” says Robinson.
Photograph: Tristan Hopkins/Channel 4īennett can’t remember the reason Channel 4 gave for cancelling, but it felt “abrupt” and left him shocked – with a storyline for a third series that looked destined never to see the light of day. Top girl … Letitia Wright in the original series. The show got a mixed reception from residents of Hackney when the Observer screened it to youth groups, but it was lauded by critics for its brutal portrayal of life in east London just after the 2011 riots. The Independent called it “ Britain’s answer to The Wire”, while Vice dedicated an oral history to the making of it.
Originally pitched to the BBC as a one-off TV film, the Beeb balked at the language and its stark gang-related subject matter, so Bennett shopped it to Channel 4, which commissioned it and greenlit a second season. “We were all on the same page – it just happens that he’s Drake.”ĭrake fronted a pitch to Netflix in LA and an hour later they had a deal. “He understands the culture and saw that needed to come back,” adds Ashley Walters, who plays Dushane, the titular Top Boy who rises from low-level street dealer to potential East End kingpin. You’d wake up and have hundreds of messages.” What was more shocking was that when he posted about Top Boy, the reaction was mad. “He was into the show’s music,” says Kane Robinson – AKA Kano, the grime MC who starred in the original series as Sully, a duplicitous but driven dealer. Luckily for Bennett, Netflix and quite a few other people did. He saw that the show needed to come back Kano “But honestly, I didn’t know who he was.”ĭrake understands the culture. “My children were like, ‘Whaaaaat?’” he says. The pair arranged a dinner in London to thrash out a plan – much to the disbelief of Bennett’s kids, who had to inform him he was about to meet one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. When he found out it had been cancelled, he decided to bring it back by teaming up with Bennett and pitching it to Netflix. He had been recommended it while on tour and loved it so much, he began posting stills from the show on Instagram with clumsy attempts at London slang (“real bod man”). Drake was a fan of Top Boy, Bennett’s Channel 4 drama about the lives of drug dealers and residents on a fictional Hackney estate called Summerhouse. ‘I told them I was on my way out to meet some singer called Drake,” says writer Ronan Bennett, recalling the unlikely story of how he went out for dinner with the Canadian rapper and somehow managed to make himself seem less cool in front of his children.