Page 512 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

Coel as Tracey in Chewing Gum
CHANNEL 4

The line is typical of the outrageous honesty Coel brings to potentially fraught subject areas —
race, sex, relationships and the city she grew up in. Chewing Gum is set in one of the capital’s

poorer parts, but she paints it in bright sunny colours a million miles from any Ken Loach-style

inner-city grimness.

Many of Tracey’s travails touched on aspects of Coel’s life, growing up in Hackney with a
single Ghanaian mum and attending local Roman Catholic primary and secondary schools.

Coel was a teenage Christian convert in the Pentecostal faith and brought the rest of her family
into the fold; ironically, they remain believers, but she isn’t any more. In Chewing Gum,

Tracey’s mother and sister are devout Christians while Tracey is not, with the young woman’s

eagerness to explore her sexuality (“I throb so hard it’s like my vagina’s got epilepsy”) bringing

obvious conflict. Race and class are part of life, not the focus of the show, as exemplified by

another of Tracey’s memorable lines when discussing her (white) boyfriend Connor: “I always