RONAN BENNETT PART TWO

One of our greatest crime writers in context

Channel 4’s Top Boy

The scenario outlined in City of God offered a possible way forward for Top Boy and Ronan Bennett is right to see it as one of his greatest works so far in what is after all a highly prolific canon.  While Dushame, almost like Little Z, is determined to become top boy at all costs, embracing the values of capitalism on disadvantaged terms, like all the classic gangsters from George Raft and Jimmy Cagney through Harold Shand to the present, it was Ra Nell who provided the moral counterweight and more class-conscious perspective, a bit like Red Ray’s mother and Connie in Face.  In this we are reminded that Grime music also comes from the South London estates, especially from Croydon, although it also has its gangster alter-ego in the form of Drill.  Grime, in turn, is perhaps the most significant cultural expression of resistance against the injustices of neo-liberal capitalism, including racism, since boring old punks like John Lydon decided that immigration had divided Britain.

It is interesting to postulate how far Top Boy in its original low budget manifestation could have gone down this route before Channel 4 decided to axe the series during lockdown.  One of the most memorable moments in this original series, for me, was when a young black boy employed as a cocaine mule delivers drugs to some yuppie who is clearly either an academic (in a corrupt and market facing University system) or works in the media.  I mention this because we’ve all encountered the type before, who deals a bit of Charlie to his mates and deludes himself that his world of recreational drug taking is a lifestyle choice somehow separate from the sordid world of criminal drug trafficking, sink estate crack houses and county lines gangs.  This, as Karl Marx would have said, is commodity fetishism writ large, much as the consumer of pornography is in denial as to the world of exploitation that creates it.  The young boy is immediately impressed by the yuppies collection of books and asks if they are about history.  The yuppie can’t get the young lad out of his house quick enough.

This reminds us, I think, that the series Guerrilla, featuring Idris Elba, and which screened on the Murdoch owned Sky of all places, actually featured members of the Black Panther Party under Darcus Howe, who had links to the Workers Revolutionary Party in Brixton in the 1970s when the series was set.  It also reminds us how in both the novel and movie of Shaft, starring Robert Rowntree, and despite its misogyny and homophobia, the Black Panthers again reappear and help the black detective rescue the abducted daughter of a gang boss from his rivals in a scenario that owes something to Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest.

Given that Harold Shand only met his particular nemesis in the form of the IRA, this raises the question, was there always an even better series inside of Top Boy trying to get out in which revolution and resistance played a prominent role?  This is particularly salient given the rise and normalisation of the new fascism at this time..

Lost in Translation?  Top Boy on Netflix

Something that needs to be said here is that film and TV critics are often unaware of the difficulties that we script writers often face in trying to get our stuff made, particularly if it is of a front line or controversial character, conforming to what I call “the crime fiction of the sociological imagination.”  Compromises have to be made and it is far too easy for the academic or critic who is not part of the industry, to overlook this.  Perhaps that’s why nobody built a statue to a critic.  When I was working on my PhD I met Troy Kennedy-Martin and was astonished that about two thirds of what he wrote never actually got made.  I also know from personal experience how “risk averse” to frontline social and political issues certain companies linked to Netflix can be.

The fact remains, however, that while Canadian rapper Drake undeniably “saved Top Boy by taking it to Netflix and raising its concept (along with its budget) something was lost in the translation.  For a start, no gangster of the stature to which Dushane had now risen was going to carry on living on a sink estate in Hackney and a lot of the action now transferred to the world of the super-wealthy, in Spain, much as in Brian De Palma’s re-make of Scarface with Al Pacino in the 1980s.   It’s true that since Harold Shand, in 1981, and particularly since the structural changes to capitalism in the mid 1980s it is no longer enough that the screen gangster is punished by the capitalist values he – or she –embraces.  They also have to be punished by the Thatcherite world they helped create and while the Devil preferred to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven you can’t really create a Thatcherite world from a Hackney council flat.

Significantly, The Guardian praised the later seasons of Top Boy for introducing themes of homophobia but, just as telling, this was framed by the glamorous world of Vogue models and, again, the super-rich.  This isn’t to say that the women who inhabit this world can’t be targets for abuse, especially if they can be blackmailed over being gay.  Harvey Weinstein and the “Me Too” movement bear testimony to that.  But the absence of a Na Rell character, whether male or female, to provide a Greek chorus commentary or moral counterweight, robs the narrative of something.  In particular, it robs it of a point of contact with the world not of class identity but class consciousness that Connie and Red Ray’s mother provided in Face.

Of course, Dushane does return to the estate, as surely as Jack Carter returned to his own “working class crap hole” in the North.  Dushane even tries to project himself as a community champion, like Harold Shand, by serving as a private sector property speculator.  The problem here is that it is property speculation, the property ladder and the private sector in general that has turned London into the Hell hole it certainly is – and for which immigrants are then blamed.  Ergo when Dushane, as surely as Harold Shand, meets his inevitable demise, do we really see him as a tragic hero or just another sad-arsed outlaw out of time, like Dillinger, George Raft and James Cagney?

I personally think the series could have ended differently if Dushane had indeed experienced an epiphany moment and tried to use his wealth to transform both the community from which he was derived and wider society.  Setting up a network of credit unions would put the loan sharks out of business thereby undermining drug revenues and recruitment to county line gangs.  While it is unlikely that he’d give up on drug dealing altogether there have been examples of gang leaders e.g. in Manchester announcing a prohibition on heroin dealing and resolving to remove guns from the community, even standing as candidates for Class War Federation.  If in this role Dushane had been lured to his death by trying to negotiate a ceasefire between rival criminal gangs, and with corrupt police and even SO15 in the mix then there really wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house when his past life of violence reclaimed him as certainly as Jack Carter on Durham’s Blackhall Beach.

Bibliography

Becket, F. and Hencke, D. (2009) Marching to the Fault Line: The Miners Strike and the Battle for Industrial Britain

Briant, G. (1993) British Television Drama in the 1980s. First Edition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Broe, D. (2019) Film Noir, American Workers and Popular Holywood, University of Florida Press

Bullough, O. (2019) Money-Land: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take it Back.  First Edition. London. Profile Books

Bullough, O. (2022) Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals.  First Edition. London. Profile Books

Campbell, T. (2023) “Th Enemy Within: Football Hooligans and the Miners’ Strike,” Society and History, Volume 43, Issue 1

Chibnall, S. (1985) “Whistle and Zoot: the Meaning of a Suit of Clothes” in History Workshop Number 20. Oxford. Oxford University Press

Chibnall, S. (2007) Get Carter.  First Edition. London. IB Taurus

Chibnall, S. and Murphy, R. (1999) British Crime Cinema.  First Edition. Oxford. Routledge

Clarke, A (1992) “You’re Nicked,” in Strinati and Wragg (eds) Come on Down: British Popular Culture.  First Edition. Oxford. Routledge

Clarke, S., Lovell, T and McDonnell, K (1980) One Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture. First Edition. London. Shocken Books

Clarke, W. (2012) The Curse of Brinks Mat: Twenty Five Years of Murder and Mathem – The Inside Story of the 20^th Century’s Most Lucrative Armed Robbery.  First Edition. London. Querus

Conrad, MT (2016) The Philosophy of Film Noir. University Research and Teaching

Cook, AJ. (2008) Troy Kennedy-Martin. First Edition. Manchester. Manchester University Press.

Cox, B, Shirley, J. and Short, M. (1977) The Fall of Scotland Yard.  First Edition. London. Penguin.

De Bord, G. (2000) The Society of the Spectacle. London. Rebel Books

Eagelton, T. (jan/Feb 1976) “Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams,” in New Left Review

Friedman, LD (1995) British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started.  First Edition. Oxford. Routledge

Freidrichs, O. (2014) City of Nets: A portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s.  Second Edition. Berkeley. Harp Peron

Fine, B and Millar, R. (1985) Policing the Miners’ Strike. First Edition. London. Lawrence and Wishart

Frayling, C. (2000) Serge Leone: Something to do With Death. First Edition. London. Faber and Faber

Hillyard, P. and Percy-Smith, J. (1988) The Coercive State: The Decline of Democracy in Britain. First Edition. London. Fontana

Hobbs, D. (1994) Doing the Business: Entrepreneuership, the Working Class and Detectives in East London.  First Edition. Oxford. Oxford University Press

Hobbs, D. (1995) Bad Business: Professional Crime in Britain. First Edition. Oxford. Oxford University Press

Hobbs, D. (July 2013) “Lavish Life: Costing Organised Crime in the UK,” in British Journal of Criminology, Volume 33, Number 4. Oxford. Oxford University Press

Hobsbawm, E. (September 1972) “Social Bandits” in Comparative Studies in Society and History. Volume 4, Number 9

Hunt, L. (1998) From Sexploitation to Safari Jackets: British Low Culture. First Edition. Oxford. Routledge  

Jackson, G. (1994) Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of Geprge Jackson.  Acuppolla Books

Kennedy, P. (1998) “Coming to Terms with Contemporary Capitalism: Beyond the Idealisation of Globalisation and Capitalist Ascendency Arguments,” in British Sociology, Volume 3, Issue 2

Lavender, A. (1003) “Edge of Darkness” in Briant (eds) British Television Drama in the 1980s.  First Edition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Lota, KJ. (no date) “The Post Noir Novel: Pulp Genre, Alienation and the Turn From Post Modernism to Noir in Contemporary Crime Fiction, University of Carolina Department of English

Milne, S. (200) The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners.  Third Edition. London. Verso

Mungham, G. and Pearson, G. (1976) Working Class Youth Culture. First Edition. London. Routledge, Keegan and Paul

Newton, HP (2009) Revolutionary Suicide. London. Penguin Classics

Pilling. G. (2015) Marx’s Capital: Philosophy and Political Economy.  Second Edition. Oxford.  Routledge Classics

Reiner, R. (2000) the Politics of the Police. Fourth Edition.  Oxford, Oxford University Press

Schraeder, P. (1972) “Notes on Film Noir” in Sight and Sound

Silver, A. (2016) Film Noir Compendium: Key Selections from the Film Noir Research Series. First Edition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Steiner, P. (1984) Russian Formalism: A Meta-Poetics. First Edition. Cornell University Press

Ticktin, H. (no date) “The Decline of Capitalism” in Critique 25

 Triplow, N. (2017) Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir.  First Edition. London

Willis, P. (2000) Learning to Labour: How Working Class kids Get Working Class Jobs. First Edition. Oxford. Routledge

Willis, P. (2014) Profane Culture. Princetown University Press

Worpole, K. (2008) Docker and Detectives.  Second Edition. London. Five Leaves Publications