When Candice Carty-Williams’ debut novel Queenie was released back in 2019, it felt like a real publishing phenomenon. You’d spot its colourful covers – readers could choose from a spectrum of rainbow hues – in the hands of bleary-eyed commuters; that summer, it was about as ubiquitous as Zara’s notorious white spotted maxi dress. It was hailed as the Black British answer to Bridget Jones’s Diary. Five years later, heroine Queenie Jenkins has, like Bridget, been brought to life on screen, in a Channel 4 adaptation that’s bitingly funny and sharply observed.
We first meet Queenie, a 25-year-old British-Jamaican journalist played by Dionne Brown, during an early morning gynaecologist appointment. Undergoing a transvaginal ultrasound is, for most women at least, never the ideal way to kick off your working day, but her doctor’s bracing manner (briskly quizzing her on her sexual history before calling over her colleagues to survey Queenie’s scan) doesn’t exactly alleviate the awkwardness. The whole experience is made even more disconcerting – at least for the viewer – by the fact that said doctor is played by former Love Island presenter Laura Whitmore.
