As someone so accustomed to seeing a certain body type on the small screen, I have to admit that I had my doubts about My Mad Fat Diary. The lead character in the British comedy drama, told in six parts, is an overweight, obsessive-compulsive 16-year-old girl. Given the title, I was under the impression that this was not going to be a subtle discussion about obesity or eating disorders. But after sitting through the first episode — and loving it — I soon discovered that there was more to My Mad Fat Diary than the fact that the titular author was quite chunky. I was hooked.
Set in Lincolnshire, a county in the east of England, in 1996, the show is based on the journal of Rae Earl, who is convinced that she will never get to act on her teenage impulses because she is trapped in the “wrongâ€-shaped body. She has just left a psychiatric hospital after four months and now has to resume her life. That her sometime best friend Chloe now hangs out with a new group and her mother lives with her undocumented Tunisian boyfriend makes fitting right back in a lot more daunting.
Hilarious yet hard-hitting
The real-life Rae Earl scribbled in red school exercise books and Filofax pages as a 17-year-old in 1989, recently released from a mental care facility and battling extreme anxiety and self-harm. She retooled those angst-filled musings into a book, My Fat Mad Teenage Diary, published in 2007. “I want people to admit they’re not perfect. I call it being secure in your insecurities. Everyone’s got a kink, a messy bit of wiring. We’ve all got demons,†she said in a Telegraph interview early this year.
The adaptation by E4, the same British network that produced the youth-focused cult hits Skins, Misfits and The InBetweeners, tweaks some of the bestselling title’s details while retaining its hilarious yet hard-hitting tone. The setting has been relocated to the Cool Brittania of the mid- to late ‘90s, when BritPop bands such as Blur, Pulp, and Oasis ruled the scene. My own awareness of pop culture began to take shape during this time so it was a trip to hear songs by Suede, Supergrass, Björk, Kula Shaker, Tricky and The Bluetones again, an experience I’d describe as very Now…That’s What I Call Music!
My Mad Fat Diary nails the look and feel of the pre-smartphone era, from the playlists down to the baby backpacks and high-waisted stonewash jeans. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as the ‘90s are cool again. The nostalgia feels eerily foretold by Laver’s Law, which states that the lifecycle of a fashion trend spans five stages: the one in which it feels smart and of-the-moment, followed by the one in which it feels dowdy, then hideous, then amusing, and finally, after 100 years or so, romantic. As the fashion site Refinery29 notes, our current collective love affair with this decade straddles the line between charming and romantic.
Trend cycles aside, it’s the overall treatment that makes My Mad Fat Diary touching, amusing and real. I found myself rooting for Rae Earl, played by 24-year-old former stand-up comic Sharon Rooney, not despite but because of her perceived flaws. Visual gimmicks such as fantasy sequences and animated doodles act as a playful foil to some of the show’s more serious themes — bullying, homosexuality, teenage pregnancy, mental illness — but these do not detract from the cast’s undeniable charisma and commendable performance.
I confess: I don’t know what it’s like to be fat, having been tall and lanky — currently fit — my entire life. Seeing an individual with a different kind of physique navigate life, however, reinforced the reality that in spite of what mass media has conditioned us to believe, there is no such thing as a wrong or right body. People can be entertaining, beautiful, sexy or lovable at any weight.
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