Anya Ryan
Published
For Guz Khan, creating and playing Mobeen in comedy series Man Like Mobeen has become, at times, interchangeable with his real-life identity. “People come up to me and ask if I’m Man Like Mobeen in the streets, it feels crazy,” he says.
“I was in Ghana a few weeks ago, and a group of South Asian men were shouting at me. My first instinct was to think, what have I done? But they were like, ‘we’ve seen your show'".
Guz better get ready for more people to recognise him, because Man Like Mobeen, which first aired on BBC Three in 2017 is now back for its fourth series.
But, unlike the series that have gone before it, the show has a new central location. Rather than the majority of scenes being set in Small Heath in Birmingham, series four sees Mobeen behind bars after being falsely accused of Eight’s (Tez Illyas) death. “I always said I was done after season three , but something started tickling inside me,” Guz says. Returning to the series areTolu Ogunmefun, Dúaa Karim, Perry Fitzpatrick and Mark Silcox while Youssef Kerkour joins the cast as a prison kinpin.
'Shooting in a prison in Shrewsbury, it was weird bro'
The setting was inspired directly by stories from Guz’s own circles. “Some of my very close friends’ family members had been sentenced just before Covid. Listening to their experiences of being banged up in prisons got me thinking someone needs to be chatting about this,” he says.
“I’ve seen gritty crime dramas, but I don’t think anything has captured the relationships people have in prison.”
Filming in a real prison was a very different experience to the usual Birmingham base for Man Like Mobeen. “Up until now Small Heath has been a character in its own right,” Guz explains. “We always had Birmingham as a centre. Shooting in a prison in Shrewsbury, it was weird bro.”
The authenticity of the first three series is still woven into every creative decision of Man Like Mobeen. “If I was leaving out all the Punjabi or Urdu vernacular and the British diaspora slang, it wouldn’t be real would it? But that’s the stuff that often isn’t written down on paper. It just comes out.”
His desire to represent his community accurately drove Guz in his initial writing of Man Like Mobeen. “I was fighting to create something for the people I knew. I didn’t really care if anyone else liked it.”
Because of this, the series deals with some pretty dark subject matters, including death, racism, knife crime, substance abuse and poverty. “For me and a lot of other people in this show, that is real life. If you want to dwell on it, it is really sad,” Guz says. But, finding the humour within life’s difficult moments he believes is key “to staying energised”.
'You could either be hard or try and make people laugh'
Making people laugh is a huge part of Guz’s life now, but he is reluctant to admit that he knew he had a talent. “I find it weird when people say I always knew I was funny, like it was destiny,” he says.
But, he was confident in his ability to make his peers laugh. “In primary school, you could either be hard or try and make people laugh, and I think I found my place,” he says.
Guz, whose dad died when he was three, also always tried to make his family laugh. “I think because we were actually a little bit sad,” he reflects. “But, I kept thinking, this is bad vibes, let’s try and laugh together.”
His hometown of Coventry is still the place Guz feels “most comfortable”.
“I just love driving around Coventry and seeing people I grew up with. Emotionally and spiritually, these people understood me before all this.”
The comedian has just spent some time acting in Hollywood, which he describes as a “cool” and “alien” experience. “When it is good it is good, but it is not the be all and end all,” he says.
“You can have more fun just being creative, making something in your bedroom and I’m not even joking.”
“If I’m remembered as a creative hustler, that’s real, that’s honest”.
Guz also says he would love to film in Pakistan, where some of his family lived before coming to the UK.
“It would be an important life experience,” he says.
‘We're not doing a good enough job at getting people's stories'
Guz thinks the TV industry still has a way to go on embracing diversity. “It has got better at including more people,” he says. “But, for South Asian communities, I think we’re still stuck a little bit.
“People think, obviously worldwide we’ve got Bollywood. But when it comes to being represented here, I don’t think the job is being done properly. There’s a lot of different categories within the South Asian community alone,” he says.
However, Guz is not one to pass on the responsibility. On the sets of Man Like Mobeen he runs the Mobeen Training Programme open to over 18s in the West Midlands, to give people the opportunity to work on a TV shoot and get their first credit. He’s also started his own production company.
“We’re not doing a good enough job at getting people's stories. I want to tell people who don’t even know that this is a career, that it can be an option.”
Man Like Mobeen is on BBC Three and on BBC iPlayer.