As Ali Shahalom and Aatif Nawaz scan the faces on the walls of the boardroom we’re in, their faces light up. “The BBC have put us in the brown room!” laughs Shahalom, gazing up at the cast of Goodness Gracious Me. It feels fateful that this is where we meet in Broadcasting House, given the impact the pioneering British-Asian sketch show had on these two comics. (“That was the first time I ever saw brown people on TV,” says Shahalom. “That did something to me.”) These days he and Nawaz are the trailblazers; they are about to launch Muzlamic – the first British-Muslim sketch show ever broadcast on the BBC.



From airport interrogations to a childrens’ author forced to answer extraneous questions while plugging a book called The Diary of a Friendly Squirrel (“Don’t you think it was insensitive to release it so soon after the anniversary of September 11?!”), the Muzlamic pilot is made up of bite-sized chunks that never outstay their welcome. In one sketch, which they refer to as “the whitest brown guy”, two feuding colleagues stalk one another around an office in Stevenage, playing top trumps with facts like “I’m so white I have a loyalty card at Greggs” and “I think a C is a really good grade.”

Shahalom and Nawaz often offer up a jester v straight man dynamic, with Shahalom playing loveable buffoons like Bethnal Green-based barber Mabz, while Nawaz is the dissatisfied customer who ends up with a hot towel shoved on his face (“the shaving foam went up my nose and I sneezed for 34 minutes straight,” he recalls of filming the sketch). But while far less polarised in person, their comedy backgrounds couldn’t be more different. British-Pakistani comic Nawaz, 34, took the tried-and-tested route of open mics and Edinburgh stints, followed by a glut of unsuccessful attempts to get scripts into production.

Meanwhile, 26-year-old former marketer Shahalom, of Bangladeshi descent, started his comedy career at the age of 18 on YouTube. His first ever video was a selection of things “British Asians Say”, name-checking Rubicon Mango drink and Chris Morris’s Four Lions. He currently has close to 400,000 Instagram followers, and his gags range from overindulging at the evening meal of Ramadan (“Can we get seven mixed grills – no make it eight – 19 pizzas and seven plates of cheesy chips … this is a lot of food for three people”) to being terrified of spiders. (“We’re moving house! Pack your bags!”)

The pair met in 2016 on the way to a shared standup gig, and later bonded on a trip to a Birmingham comedy club. They decided to collaborate, eventually landing on a sketch show inspired by everything from Goodness Gracious Me to the League of Gentlemen, via the Chapelle Show and modern masters Key & Peele. According to the blurb, Muzlamic will show the world from “the perspective of two Muslim comedians, or rather, two comedians who happen to be Muslim”. They write comedy using three golden rules: “‘Will Allah be OK with this? Will my parents be OK with this? And will I be OK with this?’ Which I think are three great rules to live by generally, right?” says Nawaz.

More than a little used to an airport interrogation ... Muzlamic. Photograph: Matt Stronge/BBC Studios

Keeping in mind Shahalom’s “digital entry point” – a phrase he repeats a few times, like any good ex-marketer should – they decided to film their own pilot, balancing their phones on piles of books and using selfie sticks, and see what broadcasters thought. If this sounds like a risk, what they did next sounds even riskier. Eschewing agents, they started contacting the likes of the BBC themselves. “I was like, bro, I’m going to slide into DMs, and I’m going to slide into the emails of these commissioners and these controllers and someone’s got to respond,” says Shahalom. Most of their messages went unanswered, but they did get one reply – from the head of comedy at BBC Studios no less. Soon they were scaling up their ideas with the producer of black British sketch show Famalam, which has had two series on BBC Three in the past two years.



Muzlamic arrives at a time when sketch comedy is gaining ground once again – and it is more varied than ever, whether that’s the dark-side-of-the-internet vibe of Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave, Ellie White and Natasia Demetriou’s brilliantly daft Ellie and Natasia, or the on-point satire of Alternatino, the first Latino sketch show to air in the US. And, inspired by the popularity of short-form content like Insta videos, they all seem to be returning to a scattergun, Fast Show approach. Indeed, Shahalom says that from the start they think about “what [could] go viral? What minute from that is going to be shared on meme pages?”



While “Whitest Brown Guy” has definite meme potential, the show also boasts moments that are more real than surreal in a time of increasing Islamophobia. The opening sketch takes place in an airport, with the pair playing two men more than slightly au fait with being probed and searched – so much so that they’ve arrived at the airport the day before their flight.

The show’s title is taken from a now-infamous video of an EDL member ranting about “Muzlamic ray guns”. “I’m sure the right wing are going to hate this show,” says Shahalom. “Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll convert to Islam.” So are they two Muslim comics, or two comics who happen to be Muslim? “It’s not just one or the other,” says Shahalom. “I would hate to disenfranchise myself away from my colour and faith to fit in. But I would also feel uncomfortable with just being the tokenistic guy, you know? I don’t want to leave my dignity at the door and just play John who’s completely lost his faith and culture and is Mr Universal.”

Nawaz nods. “For me, being Muslim is like being right-handed,” he says. “It’s a part of me, like being 5’8 or having the blood type B positive, and it informs a lot of the way my life is organised, but it’s not always specifically relevant.” As such, it was important for them to swerve tired tropes – for example, playing terrorists, punching down or viewing Muslims as a homogenous group – while also staying in line with their values.



They’re itching for people to watch the pilot, but what’s next? “We want to do 650 episodes,” says Nawaz, tongue slightly in cheek. “But really, we want to be the first show to do an Eid special, like The Office had its Christmas specials.” For now though, the plan is to push the boundaries as much as they can, and, says Shahalom, “make people think, talk and question things”. He pauses, before adding one more tiny thing on the wish list. “Oh, and we’d love to have a Muzlamic room here one day. That would be pretty cool.”



Muzlamic is on BBC Three/iPlayer from 22 July