'Top Boy' saves the day

The Christmas and holiday period for most, let's make no bones about it, is the most harrowing and cheerless of the year.

No matter how one tries to keep one's expectations near bootstrap level, it is simply impossible not to become carried away by the gaudy bonhomie of the season.

The result, of course, is every year one lets oneself go, and, despite bitter experience, imagines the simple joys only childhood provide will somehow be re-created come December 25.

They are not, and the result is the release of simmering family tensions, as the cruel disappointment of reality hammers a wedge into the relationships already frayed from a contempt born of familiarity.

Such was my sorry reality, post-Yuletide. So it was some comfort to find, with curtains drawn tight shut on the bitter light of inadequacy, a flicker of comfort on the television.

Top Boy came unexpectedly in a small flood just after Christmas, as SoHo ran the four-episode first series back-to-back.

It is the story of life on the Summerhouse Estate in East London, as Dushane (Ashley Walters) and his friend Sully (Kane Robinson) rise through the ranks of the underworld by selling drugs to the poor saps in the crime- and poverty-ridden housing estate.

Top Boy is written by Ronan Bennett, an Irish gentleman with an extremely interesting history (look it up), who wrote a novel someone, somewhere, compared with the work of Graham Greene: good enough for me.

The music for the series is written by Brian Eno.

Yes: Brian Eno.

The second series also began unexpectedly; episode two screened on SoHo in a variety of timeslots in the last few days.

Top Boy is worth finding, however you go about it.

The show is best described as a chav (a derogatory informal British term meaning a young, lower-class person who displays brash and loutish behaviour and wears real or imitation designer clothes) version of The Wire.

London stands in for Baltimore, and Dushane is a cross between Stringer Bell and D'Angelo Barksdale.

Instead of ''aight'' at the end of every sentence, the Summerhouse Estate crew has ''innit?''Another similarity between the two shows is quality.

I came to Top Boy by mistake, halfway through an episode, and the quality of the acting and cinematography were instantly obvious, as was the humour of the slang-heavy dialogue.

The clincher was the ease with which one is drawn into the story.

This is excellent television.

Meanwhile True Detective (also SoHo) just got better and more self-assured in its second episode, amid news HBO has signed a new two-year deal to continue the show starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey.

A salve for our grief is assured.

- Charles Loughrey

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