Latest news with #ManLikeMobeen
BBC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Black Country actor aims to inspire South Asian community
A 19-year-old who landed his dream role in the TV series Man Like Mobeen says he is "proud" to help break down barriers for South Asian Zafar, from the Black Country, plays the character Moped in the BBC comedy's fifth and final did his audition on a Zoom call from his bedroom and said landing the part took him "one step closer to the dream I had when I was eight years old".Mr Zafar said he believed the success of programmes like Citizen Khan, Man Like Mobeen, Virdee and Ackley Bridge showed there was a growing appetite for South Asian television series. He believes it is important for series like these to break down barriers."I'm from the Pakistani community, so acting is very looked down upon in my community of South Asian people," he said."It's a cultural hangover, where doctors and lawyers are seen to be proper jobs." Man Like Mobeen, which was filmed in Birmingham and Coventry, has been described as a launch pad for young acting Zafar said he had been "chilling out" at home after finishing at his acting BTEC Halesowen College when he saw the invitation on Instagram to a casting call in Birmingham and thought to himself, "why not".He said his college course had prepared him well for auditions and added: "You're quite confident in yourself when you're doing them regularly."Appearing on set was a different matter though and he admitted to feeling a bit starstruck when he first met the star of Man Like Mobeen, Guz Khan."A few years back I was just watching the show with my friends," he said."It was just seeing someone you only see on screen in real life." Mr Zafar has recently filmed a small part in the upcoming film I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning and said his preference would be to do more television and film he said: "If I just get to perform and I like the role and I like the script, I'll do it."He also said he hoped his story could encourage others from his community to take up acting."If I can inspire anyone to just follow what they want to do when they dream, honestly that would be the best feeling on earth," he said. Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Man Like Mobeen final season review – who said childish jokes can't be hilarious?
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 an apparently racist dinosaur in 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 critique and a 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.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Man Like Mobeen, review: this final series remains culturally authentic
The launch of the fifth and final series of the comedy Man Like Mobeen (BBC Three) is, at the very least, a reminder to go back and watch the other four. This is a perfect example of how low-budget, very British, small-scale sitcom can still work in the age of bottomless-pocketed streamers and truncated attention spans. I say it 'can' work. Depending on what you read, Man Like Mobeen has either been cruelly 'axed' by the BBC or star and creator Guz Khan doesn't want to do any more. So you could say it doesn't work. Either way, on this evidence, its demise is a crying shame. The new series (which, without wishing to give the game away, does feel valedictory) is an intensely likeable and very funny exercise in building characters and then having them make the same mistakes again and again. And that is the very essence of sitcom. For newbies, the show follows former drug dealer Mobeen (Khan) as he struggles to escape his past and raise his beloved little sister Aqsa in among the Muslim community in Smallheath, Birmingham. At the end of the last series, nearly two years ago, Mobeen was stabbed... but we knew then that he wasn't dead. Aqsa, we also knew, was somehow in Sharjah taking a job interview with Mobeen's nemesis Uncle Khan (Art Malik, having the time of his professional life). Series five is thus a simple exercise in closing the circle – Mobeen's mission is to find Aqsa and get her back. All the plotlines stem from that spine and its simplicity gives the series an action-thriller's momentum. Of course the joy (one of the joys) of Man Like Mobeen is it would never claim to be anything as highfalutin' as an action-thriller. Indeed, it would never claim to be anything, really, other than a series of larks and your-mum gags. Nevertheless, the Find Aqsa plot is cleverly handled, dotted judiciously amongst the daft set pieces to the point where the show has become moreish. It's also still very funny. Some of the smaller roles – Mark Silcox as Uncle Shady (because no one throws shade like Uncle Shady); Salman Akhtar as Saj – have been honed to comedic perfection over multiple episodes. By now, they really don't have to do or say very much to have an audience in stitches. Even so, Saj's rap in episode two or Shady's newfound moustache obsession are straight-to-meme brilliant. Man Like Mobeen has always been lauded for its cultural authenticity: it's a story of young Muslim men that doesn't feel like it was honed by all-white executives who wouldn't touch Muslim Birmingham with a Zoom call. But it's worth pointing out that authenticity is a term that's usually applied to drama. If MLM is indeed done, its legacy will have been to show how, actually, the essence of authentic culture often lies in comedy – the stupid things people say and the way they josh and rib one another. For a show that has been reliably funny from first to last, that's a serious achievement.
BBC News
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Birmingham show Man Like Mobeen made to inspire pride
A TV comedy set in Small Heath, Birmingham, was made to make the people of the West Midlands proud, its creator has Man Like Mobeen, Coventry comedian Guz Khan plays the starring role of a former drug dealer trying to live a good life as a Muslim, while raising his younger said he wanted to portray the experiences of second-generation immigrants and hinted the fifth and final series would provide "closure" for show returns to BBC Three on Thursday. Khan said all actors in the Bafta-nominated comedy were from "very working class backgrounds"."Instead of trying to manufacture what that's like and what it feels like to be from those communities, we knew it straight away," he said he felt happy the team had been able to show there was room for different types of comedy, with more realistic, grounded characters viewers might have met at school, on the bus, or in a factory."The aim was always to make a show that the people of the West Midlands, Birmingham, Small Heath, and the surrounding areas would be proud of," he said. Khan said the programme had enabled him to "highlight issues that have affected us growing up".He also said he realised, after filming the first series, that it was the first time he had done "serious acting".He described the experience as "emotional and a little bit serious and a little bit dramatic".The latest series came about because everywhere he went people asked him when there would be more episodes, he said, adding: "We had to make some closure for the fans." Now he plans to spend more time at home with his wife and five children, to "stay at home and just be a dad"."Five kids is a lot of kids. I love them. We have a laugh, but it's a lot of work," he said. The fifth series of Man Like Mobeen is available to watch on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer from 1 May. Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Metro
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
BBC fans have hours to binge 'phenomenal' series before final season drops
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video TV lovers need to catch up on all four seasons of BBC's 'fantastic' comedy Man Like Mobeen ahead of the season five release. The fifth season will also be the swan song for the Bafta-nominated series created by and starring Guz Khan. Man Like Mobeen is set in Birmingham and follows the titular Mobeen (Guz), a former drug dealer attempting to be an upstanding Muslim and member of the community in 'the ends' (aka Small Heath). He gets up to plenty of antics with his friends, Nate (Tolu Ogunmefun) and Eight (Tez Ilyas), and has a sweet and protective relationship with his younger sister Aqsa (Dúaa Karim). As the synopsis reads: 'All Mobeen wants to do is follow his faith, lead a good life and keep his little sister on track. But with his dodgy past chasing him, can he stay on the right side of wrong?' The first season aired in 2017 and quickly became a staple British comedy with the fourth season coming out in June 2023 and ending on a nail-biting cliffhanger. Almost two years later fans will finally get to see the epic conclusion to Mobeen's story with a whopping six-episodes, and there's still time to catch up ahead of the premiere. Although it seems like a big undertaking it's only a total of 17 episodes, with each one coming in at a modest 20 minute runtime making it a bite-sized binge. One anonymous reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes said: 'Highly underrated. It's easy to love and root for the ensemble in Man Like Mobeen. There's comedy, there's drama, and there's great chemistry. A must-see.' Another fan, Thimal D, echoed: 'Man Like Mobeen's fourth season is phenomenal. Guz Khan's and Tboy's chemistry is fantastic and hilarious with brilliantly-written moments of comedy ever-present throughout the 4 episodes, even during the most devastating of scenes.' Over on X, user bob_bajwa shared: 'Just watched season 4 of Man Like Mobeen – hats off brother, that was sik!' 'Man Like Mobeen has me in tears,' Rubzzzz1 said. 'Rewatching Man Like Mobeen before the new series starts this week, so good! Guz Khan, we've spent the weekend in hysterics,' lynsey dickson added. And even co-star Tez (who may or may not appear in later seasons), celebrated it as a 'manic, fun, self-contained story.' More Trending As for the new season, there's plenty to look forward to with the description reading: 'In the final series, Mobeen must save Aqsa but can he even get a passport or a plane ticket to the UAE? And will he convince his friends to join him?' Announcing the return of the show in October, Guz joked he couldn't even 'shop at Aldi without someone popping out from behind the bread aisle' and asking about another season. He added: 'So for you, and only for you, here's one, final, very last, never to be done again season of Man Like Mobeen. P.S Please don't make me make anymore, I got loads of kids to raise and that. Love you.' View More » Man Like Mobeen returns on Thursday May 1 at 9pm on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer. The first four seasons are available to stream now. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Doctor Who is fixing its biggest mistake – but it might be too late MORE: EastEnders confirms special episode for return of show's biggest ever legend MORE: Strictly Come Dancing pro sparks quitting fears after announcing new career move
