The jolting artistry of Michaela Coel

EVERY YEAR the Edinburgh Television Festival, one of the highlights of the industry’s calendar, invites a prominent figure to deliver a talk known as the MacTaggart lecture. Past speakers have included Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt and Armando Iannucci. In 2018 Michaela Coel, a British writer and actor, took to the podium. She was the first woman from an ethnic minority to do so and, at 30, the youngest lecturer in the festival’s history.

Ms Coel described her upbringing on a council estate in east London, where her family would receive “a bag of shit through our letter-box”. She recalled her time at a Catholic school, finding God (then losing him again) as a young adult, and the racist slurs she endured at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she was “the first black girl they’d accepted in five years”. She lamented the lack of opportunities and support for minorities in television, promising to “play whatever part I can to help fix this house”. The speech was raw and personal, but also shot through with humour. When malicious rumours were spread about her at school, she remembered, she had retorted that “the only thing I was blowing was the clarinet.”

Talking over Zoom, she evinces the same mix of gravity and zaniness, thoughtful pauses alternating with peals of laughter. This jolting blend of moods defines...