I May Destroy You - A Criminal Lawyer's Perspective

It was almost mocking of the BBC, as the UK staggered into the final weeks of lockdown, to launch a show so fizzing with the excitement and potential of a night out. Just as the nation was beginning to forget what it was to head out with carefree abandon, guided only by an urge to see where the night might take you, here came Michaela Coel's devastating 'I May Destroy You'.

Devastating for so many reasons but principally in showing how quickly the carefree can be catapulted into confusion and trauma and searching. This show is a must watch for anybody who wants to understand more about what it is to be young, urban, black, female, questing, alive basically.

But for those that work in the criminal justice system this 12 part series offers much, much more than a slice of life and cracking entertainment. Coel's ear for dialogue isn't just good she serves up the kind of verisimilitude that seems born of scribbled notes of conversations actually had. Interactions don't just ring true they sound spoken as if for the first time.

Coel is being profiled the world over right now but the stand out interview with her appeared in The Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/article/michaela-coel-i-may-destroy-you.html. In it she recounts her own experience of sexual assault having been spiked. In the show the same experience repeatedly intrudes upon her character Arabella by way of flashbacks with the perpetrator's face never quite being revealed.

The show is about many things and sex looms very large as a theme but with consent as the real nub of the matter. Hers is not the only narrative. Her friend Terry has a threesome which is cast in a very different light in its immediate aftermath. Her other friend Kwame has a Grindr encounter that begins in consensual activity but concludes with a non-consensual attack. Kwame goes on to experiment with heterosexual sex without disclosing to the woman in question that he is gay. Arabella gets into bed with a professional colleague who removes his condom just before penetration and when caught laughs it off.

This show is like a criminal law lecture on the complexities and nuances of consent. At one end actions that are clearly criminal at the other actions that are morally objectionable but not illegal. Coel does not shy away from the difficult, indeed she seems to relish injecting layer upon layer of complexity arising from sexuality, race and much else besides. This is life as it is, confused, shifting, hard and yet joyful still.

She is fair and she is even handed. She shows two very different police experiences. Hers involves caring, dedicated and professional officers. They can't provide her the answer she is looking for but they explain in simple terms what they can and can't do. Kwame on the other hand tries to make a police complaint and has the misfortune to encounter an officer plainly completely out of his depth and all at sea. The contrast could not more clearly illustrate the importance of having specialist officers assigned to investigating sexual offences.

But the really bold thing Coel does during a reversion to school days episode is show a false rape complaint. It arises as a result of consensual sex that concludes with the boy taking footage of the girl in question without her knowledge and obviously her consent. The author of the complaint is clever, persuasive and profoundly damaged by her own domestic experiences. The complaint involves self-inflicted injury of a type likely to trigger certainty in most that the complaint was real. Interestingly it is Coel's character that exposes the falsehood.

Those of us that work in the system are profoundly aware of its shortcomings and our fallibilities. Likewise we know only too well how difficult it is to extract a reliable narrative as to what transpires in private places when only two people are present. Far too often TV drama insults the intelligence of viewers by burying nuance or obliterating shades of grey with bright white or pitchest black. Not this programme. If your jury have been watching this you now have a golden go to cultural reference whether you're prosecuting or defending. Miss it at your peril.