It’s good to have Chewing Gum back. It’s very different to any other series I’ve seen recently, while at the same time it has echoes of the BBC hit Fleabag, which it preceded. If that programme was all Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s idea about contemporary attitudes to sex, then Chewing Gum is very much Michaela Coel’s view of modern romance.

Both comedies don't fit neatly into the traditional sitcom genre, being on film without an audience. They also break with convention by featuring a very sexualised woman in the lead role (a long way from frustrated Olive from On The Buses or randy Mildred from George and Mildred). While Fleabag was decidedly posh, Coel’s Tracey lives on a council estate and is currently working in Deepak’s corner shop. Though in the first episode Deepak is away so Tracey seems to prefer to spending her time twerking rather than working.

It takes a while to tune into Chewing Gum. The pace is fast and frantic, rather like the frenetic way the mustard-jumpered Tracey speaks. But once you get on its wavelength the plot is pretty conventional. In the first episode she makes her ex, Connor (Robert Lonsdale) think that he is missing out because she is now dating a star – Stormzy. Of course once she says this she has to somehow avoid Connor finding out the truth, with the usual comic consequences.

Chewing Gum is more in-your-face funny then Fleabag, as Tracey desperately tries to play it cool but ends up scrawling all over her face with an eyebrow pencil. She is psychologically complex, juggling her high libido with her bible bashing, but if she is a fuck-up of grand proportions she is also an amiable one who means well, at one point attempting to turn a disabled toilet into a sex den, mainly by hanging empty lager cans around the walls. As I said, it’s romantic, but in its very own special way. 

Thursdays, E4, 10pm.