While I May Destroy You is a totally different proposition to Chewing Gum, which followed a 24-year-old trying to balance a hyper-religious family with a growing interest in sex, Coel’s talent for catching you off guard with humour remains. It was inspired by Coel’s own experience of sexual assault, while she was making the Channel 4 sitcom Chewing Gum, her Bafta-winning, pastel-bright comedy, an incident she revealed in her 2018 MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh international television festival. Since the start of its two-episodes-a-week run last month, Coel’s dramedy – about a group of young, black Londoners navigating friendships, dating and the ubiquity of sexual abuse – has been billed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic as the show of the year. She stuffs it down but, as such ordeals have a habit of doing, it bubbles up again. The next morning she remembers nothing bar a figure looming over her, raping her. A procrastination nightmare becomes a fun night out and then something far more serious. A Technicolor blur of pink hair and multicoloured cardigan, she meets her friends at a bar named Ego Death – that is, a total loss of one’s identity. She Googles a phrase that solidifies both hers and the viewers’ panic: “How to write quickly.” So she takes a break. She glares at the pat sentence on the screen: “So Tina, being in her 30s, couldn’t understand why you, Terrell, also 30s, would take her there on a first date.
She stares at her screen, and stares a little more, restarts her music, smokes a cigarette.
The scene turns silent, soundtrack on mute. Arabella assembles her belongings, which include caffeine tablets, into a neat pile. A Twitter star, she has been signed up to write a follow-up to her hit debut Chronicles of a Fed Up Millennial, a book you imagine could have been glibly sold as “a black, British Sex and the City”.Įxcept, the all-nighter never happens.
I may destroy you music windows#
The agitated rap of Little Simz’s Picture Perfect soundtracks her journey on a bus, windows typically filthy, through the streets of London. Author Arabella, played by Michaela Coel – also the series’ creator, writer and co-director – is about to pull an all-nighter at her agent’s Soho office. T here is a moment in episode one of I May Destroy You likely to send the heart rate of anyone who has ever procrastinated into overdrive.