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.
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