Do not come to the new series of Man Like Mobeen cold. What started out in 2017 as a relatively straightforward sitcom about three twentysomething friends who kept inadvertently grazing the criminal underbelly of their corner of inner-city Birmingham is now a violent, convoluted gangster thriller – one whose fifth and final season involves a promised assassination, the Turkish mafia, an Irish mobster, a prison doctor who is really the evil daughter of a drug kingpin, a kidnapped sister, millions in unlaundered cash and a tea shop. The action will be practically incomprehensible to the uninitiated – and pretty hard to follow even for the faithful.
Is it worth starting from the beginning? That depends. On the one hand, Man Like Mobeen does feel like an objectively valuable comic enterprise. Creator and star Guz Khan – who left his teaching job after going viral on YouTube as Mobeen, a mouthy Brummie Muslim and the prototype for this sitcom’s titular protagonist (one video saw him outraged at anapparently racist dinosaurin 2015’s Jurassic World) – is a natural clown, and uses his funny bones to power a series that immerses us in a community rarely seen on screen. As a depiction of a specific kind of British Muslim experience – working class, Midlands based – Man Like Mobeen is refreshingly rambunctious and gratifyingly uncompromising. All good sitcoms have their own vernacular; this one has the self-assurance to literally speak a different language: characters tend to slip into Urdu and Punjabi without translation. Meanwhile, racism and Islamophobia are turned into running jokes by combining irreverence with a tireless dedication to rubbishing stereotypes.
Man Like Mobeen has always been about crime – just not the sort of crime Islamophobes might associate with Muslims. When we first encounter him, our eponymous hero (Khan) is a reformed drug dealer, who has recently become responsible for his 15-year-old sister after their mum left for Pakistan. Yet it’s almost impossible for Mobeen to extricate himself from the low-level criminal network of his home town, and he and his friends – the cautious, intelligent Nate (Tolu Ogunmefun) and the dense, naive Eight (Tez Ilyas) – are often unfairly pursued by police, including the nasty Harper (Line of Duty’s Perry Fitzpatrick) and Mobeen’s insecure ex-classmate Sajid. But as the show has progressed, farcical, small-time scrapes have escalated into something deadly: by the end of series three, Eight had been shot and Nate and Mobeen framed and imprisoned for his murder.
Whether or not Man Like Mobeen is worth investing in will partly depend on your appetite for this kind of action. It will also hinge on how puerile your sense of humour is. The show’s themes – crime, racism, poverty – are weighty and the violence is grim, but Khan and his co-writer Andy Milligan lighten the load with a nonstop stream of jokes: a few clever, many juvenile, some very repetitive. Though the tenor of the show has changed, Mobeen is still getting mercilessly teased for his apparently ample bosom, while the other characters continue to mock Sajid for his small stature with a relentlessness that can be tedious and uncomfortable. The comedy is often irredeemably adolescent – there are jokes about fingering, inadvertent homosexual come-ons and a recurring gag involving someone blowing their own head off with a gun.
But childish jokes can also be hilarious. It was Uncle Shady – played completely expressionlessly by comedian Mark Silcox – that really got me: a mysterious elder who addresses everyone as “bastard,” uses “fuck on” to mean “let’s go”, and sets Mobeen up with his bad-tempered daughter who insists on eating curry filched from a funeral during their inordinately awkward first date in a swanky restaurant. Meanwhile, Sajid adds to the terrible motivational rap comedy canon with his silly paean to his erstwhile colleague Harper (who is now going into the cafe business with Nate after proving he had an exceptional palate for herbal teas while undercover in prison … I did say it was complicated).
The sheer amount of gags mean it would be an achievement to sit stony-faced through an episode of Man Like Mobeen – yet the show is not content with laughs; it is determined to double up as both a social critiqueanda hard-hitting crime drama. The combination can be jarring, and it can be confusing too – but if it does sound like your cup of chai, then good news: there are five whole series of Mobeen-based comedy and tragedy out there waiting for you.
Man Like Mobeen aired on BBC Three and is on iPlayer now.