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thought white people were bad kissers, and it’s not their fault, it’s just that they’ve got really

small lips and they can’t embrace the challenge of lips like mine.”

“Chewing Gum is the London that I know,” Coel told me. “When I grew up, my race was not a
thing. My identity was in my class. It was not about colour on my estate.”

Her work rate on the show, which started life as a National Theatre play called Chewing Gum

Dreams, amazed everyone who worked with her. Speaking after Sunday’s Bafta win, Phil

Clarke, who commissioned Chewing Gum when he was Channel 4’s head of comedy and was
the executive producer of I May Destroy You, was full of praise for her “stamina, enthusiasm,

and honesty whether writing, directing or starring and sometimes all three”. He added:

“Michaela is the real deal. She’s also very talented at being talented. She really grafts and works

hard.”

“I’m an army kind of extremist,” she told me in 2015, a reference to her work rate and youthful

Christianity, which she abandoned when she went to the Guildhall and realised that telling

people they were going to hell wasn’t winning her friends. But her industry remains

unextinguished, as demonstrated by the final episode of I May Destroy You.

I May Destroy You, which is told in a raw and fractured style, shows Arabella searching for the

perpetrator(s) of her assault. There are also moments that mercilessly eviscerate the phoniness of

London publishing folk, plus a stand-alone episode which shows Arabella as a schoolgirl facing

up to her father’s infidelity. Arabella’s best friend, Terry (Weruche Opia), has also had to

confront her failings towards her friend.