Top Boy: Good exposure for East London?

Recently I have secured a full-time job working with young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) in Tower Hamlets, London (this is a deprived part of England’s capital city). Working in this environment has made me view media on the subject of London's East End with quite different eyes.

Over the last two weeks Channel 4 have aired a four-part drama called ‘Top Boy'. It follows a few months in the life of a thirteen year-old boy called Ra’Nell. Ra’Nell’s life is far from easy; his Mum is hospitalised with a mental illness and his best friends get caught-up in selling drugs. Not every drug-dealer is stereotyped; there’s Heather, the pregnant mum seeking a better life for herself and her baby and will grow cannabis to get there, or the twelve year old pushers who join the gang for a little bit of pocket money and kudos. Neither is it wall-to-wall violence; the plot-line is nuanced, and addresses issues such as missing father figures and the desire to belong as well as the ‘reality of London life’.

The writer of the series, Ronan Bennett says he got the inspiration for the programme one afternoon walking through his neighbourhood in Hackney when he saw a twelve year old selling drugs outside the supermarket. Two-years of research followed, meeting all-sorts from dealers to journalists, social workers and school-children. The programme is deliberately not preachey. In the Guardian, Bennett writes, ‘We don’t want to discuss the issues thrown up by what I’ve seen and heard. That’s not drama. Drama is story, character, the creation of a world. We want to take viewers viscerally and emotionally to a place they have heard a lot about but don’t really know’. So in many senses it is a work of fiction, but it is going to provoke a reaction.

The photo at the top of the page was taken outside my work place in Tower Hamlets. Here it is almost as if the poster were a mere window onto the world. From my own new knowledge of this world I’ve ‘heard a lot about but don’t really know’ I’d say the characterisations were fairly accurate; the characters sound like East Londoners and their stories of broken families and peer-pressure are familiar. This is, however, only half the story. As Phil Hogan’s generous Guardian Review puts it, ‘the neighbourhood remained strangely benign: community thrived, kindly voices filled the market, mothers went to church and kept a tidy house. The sun shone on this picture of hardship’. And this is exactly my point, amid all the disaster there is great hope, rising from the streets of East London. When speaking to one local resident about the programme, interestingly he felt it was really unhelpful; when I asked about it he just said, ‘its not like that for everyone; its a bit too dramatic’. If this is a world we ‘don’t really know’ are we being informed by this programme or are we just being given new prejudices?

Today has been an interesting day for me in terms of East London and its reputation. Two young men from East London have been confirmed as dead, after being hit by a train on the line I use to get to work in the mornings.
This is a tragedy.
Two lives cut short by walking well-used railway lines. It has had a big impact on the local community who knew these lads and grieve for them. On the other hand; three Tower Hamlets heroes have today been received national recognition for their extraordinary progress into employment at the London European Social Fund Awards. All three winners are over-comers who battled against the odds of personal circumstance to achieve great things. We can choose which of these events we choose to publicise, record and turn into docu-drama and I know which one I’d rather talk about.

So, whilst Bennett did plenty of research to get his authentic East End it is important to remember that this, indeed, a dramatic representation of the truth; squished into just four hours of television and designed for impact. But is it sending the right message? And is any publicity good publicity?

You can watch Top Boy here.