From there, Coel found fame fast, via her 15-minute long graduation monologue, Chewing Gum Dreams, which saw her playing the oafishly innocent 14 year-old Tracey, and all of the characters on her London estate. The title referred to abandoned dreams, discarded on the street like chewing gum. Starting in Hackney Wick's Yard theatre, the show moved to the National, and piqued the interest of a production company, who suggested Coel developed it into a sitcom. The result was Chewing Gum, a contagiously joyful, vaudevillian series that follows Tracey as she encounters a raft of ludicrous situations in her obstinate quest to lose her virginity. The opening of the second series sees her trying (unsuccessfully) to have sex with her boyfriend, Conor, in the bathroom of a homeless shelter. She ends up drenched in her own sick.

Did Coel find it hard to give up the general omnipotence she had over Chewing Gum, and work for Brooker, the acerbic deity of British satire? "He’s a friendly genius, one of the friendly geniuses (they aren’t all friendly, you know), but he is a very, very lovely, very, very lovely guy.” When she talks, Coel throws in a few pantomime asides and reflective notes, before coming back to the main subject, which she usually tackles with exuberant, emphatic intensity, and well-timed comic effect. Did she feel any pressure to be funny when she was around Brooker? “Nah. Ooh, actually...hmmm...OH. I don’t think I ever feel pressure to be funny. So...no.” Coel might have relinquished religion, but when she gets going, she has the energy of a blasphemous preacher: “OH MY GOD!”, “Oh my God!”, “Oh Goooood!”

Coel's episode of Black Mirror, "USS Callister”, directed by Dr. Who’s Toby Haynes, sees a brilliant, lonely, sadistic CTO genetically duplicate his office workers, and strand them on a spaceship, as part of a computer game they can't get out of. The plot taps into one of Coel's fears about technology: that it can drive us to hubris and isolation. “We are now discovering that, perhaps, the people that are leading the way, and paving the way with this new technology, may not have our best interests at heart. The question is, what do we do as a population of humans? Do we say ‘Woah! Woah! Stop!’, or do we go: 'Oh, we know. But it’s so easy, so fun!'”

Does she think that governments should step in, then, and be quicker to regulate the pace of technological advancement, for fear that we will all be driven to solitude by T-shirt wearing tech-men avoiding the Silicon Valley sun? What did she think about London Mayor Sadiq Kahn’s recent announcement that Transport for London (TFL) had deemed Uber unfit to run a taxi service and was refusing to renew its license? “I’m going to be honest with you. I was really quite happy,” she says. “I remember, I put something on Twitter and someone said something like ‘oh my broken ankle, that’s why I need an Uber, so how dare you be happy now that it’s gone.’ Well, what do you think happens in the rest of the world when their ankles are broken?

“What technology is doing right now is it’s kind of making us numb. Oh LOL, a meme, HAHA. But it’s not—we aren’t….I actually thank God for television...it’s not technology, it’s storytelling. Technology is saying: ‘Do less, do less, do less’. And I don’t think it’s healthy, no.”