So onto our second episode of True Love and, as I mentioned yesterday, this time it features Lacey Turner’s Michelle in a more prominent role. This evening we see her married to Ashley Walters’ Paul, who believes the love they once had is gone since the birth of their son. It is Paul who we follow on his daily commute to his job managing a carpet warehouse, where every day he passes by a bus-stop where a girl smiles at him a moment that keeps him happy for the rest of the day that is until he gets home again.

It transpires that this girl is Jaime Winstone’s Stella, who makes Paul feel a lot more alive than his wife does as she more is keen on caring for their son or deciding what they should have for their tea. Eventually Paul decides to contact Stella, by writing his name and number by the bus stop, with the two finally meeting in her flat before quickly beginning a full-blown affair. Unlike yesterday’s encounter between Serena and Nick, which was built on memories of a relationship long since passed, here Paul’s motives for straying are because he feels that there’s no passion with Michelle any more while there is plenty with Stella.

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Having just seen Ashley Walters playing a drug dealer on an East London estate in Top Boy, a gritty new Channel 4 drama, meeting him in the wood-panelled opulence of a Chelsea hotel seems somewhat incongruous.

But if the setting is a long way from the mean streets depicted in Top Boy, the conversation returns there time and again. Walters is from a similarly tough background, and his take on growing up in such an environment is tempered by troubles that almost conspired to send him down a very different life path.

Here, he discusses Top Boy, his own run-ins with authority, and his music career, and reveals that he used to do ballet in a leotard and is scared of butterflies. Ashley Walters is a man full of surprises… Read more & comment »

Kierston Wareing (It’s A Free World) and Ashley Walters (Hustle, Small Island) join forces with major UK contemporary music stars Kane Robinson aka Kano and Scorcher in an ensemble cast of new four-part thriller Top Boy.

Written by screenwriter and novelist Ronan Bennett (Public Enemies, The Hamburg Cell) and produced by Cowboy Films (The Last King of Scotland, Poppy Shakespeare) for Channel 4, Top Boy is a 4 X 60’ original drama about young lives lived on the edge. The drama looks beyond the headlines about youth crime and delves into the personal stories of those involved.

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