Chewing Gum

Ever heard of Michaela-Moses Ewuraba O Boakye-Collinson?  It’s an outrage that she’s not a national treasure.  It’s also an outrage that I didn’t even type the whole name out – I copied and pasted it from Wikipedia.  Known professionally as Michaela Coel (as well as Michaela The Poet), Coel’s graduation project from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was the play Chewing Gum Dreams.  That was in 2012 (I was dancing in the Olympics Closing Ceremony but I don’t like to go on about it) and by 2015, the material had been developed onto e4 as series one of Chewing Gum.  Cue a BAFTA nomination then.

Coel wrote it and played the lead role of Tracey Gordon, all in the same 2015 that I spent playing email bingo in my office job.  Maybe it was that distraction that prevented me from watching that series or indeed the second, which hit our screens in January this year (when I was still ping-ponging the same emails in the same office in the same job).  But, and this is a big but, it went on a list of things I ought to watch.  And yeah, I’ve only gone and watched it now, so let’s pull it to pieces.

Tracey is 24 but her hymen is super duper intact.  This is thanks to many things, including her mother’s religious fundamentalism, her sister’s prudism, her friends’ terrible (and terribly misinterpreted) advice and her own over-enthusiasm for having all the wrong ideas about sex.  Her life goal is getting that hymen smashed through.  Imagine, then, how hilarious it is to watch that journey unfold.

There are elements of Miranda in Tracey’s pieces to camera.  She even plays on this when her cousin, Boy Tracy, visits and starts talking to her camera.  How meta.  Her wiggling about in underwear takes me back to Nighty Night’s Jill Tyrell, as does her obsession with sex at its most gruesome.  It’s graphic stuff, and it’s become a regular occurrence for my housemate to find me watching some eyebrow-raising scenes.  Oh well.  The supporting caricatures come and go with mixed results, but her sister Cynthia is consistently among the funniest.  Who knew how many jokes could be had about Ludo?

The constant e4 trails always made me laugh, and I chuckled often at the early episodes.  But once acclimatised to Chewing Gum’s sunny London estate universe, it was more mildly amusing than hilarious.  Some episodes bumble around a bit, but it’s all the more charming for not having a team of writers tightening every script into mechanical slickness.  It’s cute and it’s relatable (in that these are characters in central London, rather than LA or Westeros – I must stress that I’ve never had a hymen).

Tracey, as a character, eludes me.  Despite the window into her soul that her pieces to camera should offer, her behaviour is unpredictable.  It often seems at odds with itself, veering from confidence to shyness with maniacal intensity.  And where does she get them awful shirts?  Either way, the disparate elements to her complex personality are hard to reconcile, but surely this only makes her more realistic as an extreme representation of our own childish tittering about sex and relationships.  And now I am lolling to myself about the word titter.

I should point out that I am in no way ridiculing Coel’s amazing full name above – let’s not forget I’ve carried the surname Honeywood around with me these last thirty-two years.  It was just a hook to start this post.  As were the comments about her being a national treasure.  In fact, recent events should see her become an international treasure, as she appears in the latest Star Wars (the one that descends happily into Minions through the addition of cute furry birds – what the franchise has been missing all along) as a Resistance Monitor for the baddies.  She’s onscreen only fleetingly, but my heart leapt at the prospect of her talent being recognised and finding the largest global audience possible.  I can’t wait for her next project.