michaela coel misfits a personal manifesto

They didn’t consider the experiences of the Brown and Black cast to meet the morals of their diversity compass, because they didn’t see things from our point of view.” Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy “The producers saw shooting ‘in that place’ as a low-cost haven. (A reminder: This is not your house.)” While shooting “in a place far, far away”, she and a colleague were carrying groceries home when men started following them and hurling stones. “The deadline was pushed back,” she reveals, “but the head of comedy never found out why.”Įlsewhere, Coel talks of the reminders of her “misfit” status, such as the gift bags handed out at her first awards ceremony which contained dry shampoo, tanning lotion “and a foundation even Kim Kardashian was too dark for. She asked for her writing deadline to be pushed back and for the channel to be told the reason. She was met not with empathy but awkwardness. She discloses her poor treatment at the hands of the TV industry, describing an encounter with an unnamed producer who, shortly after she won an award, said: “Do you know how much I want to fuck you right now?” She also recalls being drugged and sexually assaulted by strangers and how “the first people I called after the police, before my own family, were the producers”. Michaela Coel: 'Like Arabella, I realised my life was about to change for ever' At 23, after dropping out of two universities, she went to drama school where she was the first black woman to have enrolled in five years, and where a teacher called her a racial slur during an improvised exercise. Even so, as a black working-class woman operating in an industry dominated largely by white middle-class men, she remains on the outside looking in – or, as she designates herself, a “misfit”.Ĭoel lays out her path into television from a childhood in London’s Tower Hamlets, where strangers pushed dog excrement through her letterbox, while drawing on “the resilience born from having no safety net”.

Before being invited to speak, she had never heard of the MacTaggart lecture – “Then again, back then I’d also never heard of Depeche Mode or Sarajevo, so no shade to the lecture – it just hadn’t beamed on to my radar.” The success of her debut drama Chewing Gum and its hit follow-up I May Destroy You means Coel has beamed on to the radars of TV viewers everywhere.

Coel’s speech is the centrepiece of Misfits, a small book with big ideas that provides revealing snapshots of a career in television from the vantage point of an outsider.

Michaela coel misfits a personal manifesto