In the first episode of Man Like Mobeen, its three stars – Mobeen, Nate and Eight – are chatting in the street when suddenly they’re surrounded by tooled-up cops searching for a drug dealer. “That’s racial profiling,” says Mobeen, his hands aloft. As Nate runs off, the officer – wielding a pimped-up gun – asks why his friend scarpered. “If I had to guess,” says Mobeen coolly, “I’d say it’s because he’s black. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called ‘history’, officer, but these kind of situations rarely work out well for the black man.”

In spite of sharing the grimy social realism of People Just Do Nothing, the Brummie swagger of Peaky Blinders and the machine-gun sarcasm of Peep Show, Man Like Mobeen teems with TV firsts. Not only is it rare to see a bearded Muslim male as a protagonist on screen in general, but one plaiting his little sister’s hair is unheard of. It’s also unique in its ability to turn racial profiling into light moments of humour.

The show is set in Small Heath in Birmingham, a city that needs an accurate corrective, having been scrutinised by channels such as Fox News and depicted as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. “For anyone in Britain, but especially the West Mids, that media image is ludicrous,” says Guz Khan, the show’s creator and leading, titular actor. “Life in Birmingham isn’t like that.”

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The BBC Three show is also an antidote to a series such as Citizen Khan, Adil Ray’s divisive sitcom about a Muslim community leader. “I wasn’t a fan at all,” Khan says of the show. “It reminds me of On the Buses.” The sexist and racist 1970s British sitcom he refers to was full of badly drawn characters and plots. Yet, in spite of its problematic scripts, for Khan’s parents it was a sign of recognition.

“When my mum and dad first came over to this country, they were just happy to see somebody of colour on TV. It didn’t matter who they were or how one-dimensional they were,” says Khan. “[They were] like, ‘I’m really happy. The National Front is running around outside, but there’s someone who looks like me on TV.’” In the present day, however, comedy should have moved on. “I just think 30 or 40 years on when you have characters playing those same stereotypes, something’s wrong. Like, ‘Look how stupid we all are, laugh at us rather than laugh with us’ is regressive.”

Two years ago Khan was a secondary school humanities teacher in his native Coventry when he started making YouTube videos as Mobeen. One video rubbished Fox News’s aforementioned take on Birmingham. Another video went viral when Khan called for Jurassic World to be boycotted because a shortened version of the pachycephalosaurus dinosaur (“pachy”) sounded like a racial slur. Throughout these videos Mobeen emerged as a flawed, opinionated, big-bearded Brummie care worker; a (potentially) former dealer who eats his meals with his mates while sitting on a sofa in the front garden and a surrogate parent to his little sister Aqsa. Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow production company soon picked up on these videos and invited him to make a BBC comedy short. Khan then got a radio gig on BBC Asian Network and appeared on Comedy Central’s Drunk History and Channel 5’s mockumentary Borderline. He has also branched into standup.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brum rap ... Guz Khan as Mobeen (centre) with co-stars Eight (Tez Ilyas, left) and Nate (Tolu Ogunmefun). Photograph: Cavebear/Tiger Aspect

“In retrospect, I realise I prepared for it with four years’ teaching,” he says. “Those kids were the most difficult audience to perform to, and it put me in good stead for grabbing a microphone.” Another thing helped: when he was five, his big sister introduced him to Eddie Murphy’s Raw. “I used to be mesmerised by how this dude in leather clothing used these accents and could have a whole room busting up.”

‘There was a period when virtually all brown characters were terrorists’ Read more

While Khan obviously hopes the four episodes of Man Like Mobeen, co-written with Ant and Dec’s jungle monologue writer Andy Milligan, prove successful, his main critics are a little closer to home. On New Year’s Eve, his performance on Live at the Apollo was screened on BBC Two – a gig he took his wife and sister to back in September. “Afterwards everyone was like, ‘That was sick’, except them,” he says. “They said, ‘Yeah, it was alright, innit.’ Then I had to drive them home for two and a half hours while they discussed other comedians’ jokes on the night.”

His mother, too, rains on her son’s parade. “If you told my old dear now, ‘Your son’s an actor,’ she’d be like, ‘Don’t mug us off, mate. He’s not an actor.’ I told her the other day what I was doing, and she’s like, ‘You think you’re famous? You’re a muppet. Get a job. Aldi are recruiting.’”



Man Like Mobeen starts on BBC One on Sunday 14 January at 23.30pm and is available on BBC Three on BBC iPlayer



