Guz Khan’s last dive into Birmingham’s criminal underbelly is both hard-hitting drama and as delightfully puerile as ever. You won’t stop laughing … even if you can’t fully follow along

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.

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Royal Court theatre, London
Singaporean Joel Tan’s play revolves around the fate of an ancient statue, in disparate scenes of thrilling complexity played by a zesty cast

Controversies over statues of cultural figureheads have churned in the news in recent years. The repatriation of a fictional 12th-century statue of a Chinese deity, carved in stone, forms the central dispute in Singaporean Joel Tan’s play.

The Bodhisattva Guanyin reclines in the “royal ease” pose at one end of a traverse stage, designed by TK Hay, with a combination of screens and mirrors. The drama is formed of 12 distinct scenes, loosely connected around the statue. It begins choppily inside the British Museum with patronising or incendiary debate by protesters and curators, sometimes set beside flashes of 19th-century imperial history. The tone switches from serious-minded to satirical to gnomic.

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Rapper turned MIT professor is unveiling a project of ‘en plein air rapping’ which is about outdoors-inspired music

“What does it mean to record outside, not just rap outside like a cypher, but actually record outside with the intention of completing a full song completely written and inspired outdoors?” rapper Lupe Fiasco mused while discussing his latest project, Ghotiing (pronounced “fishing”). “What are the limitations and constraints? What do you have to prepare to go into that environment? Onlookers, insects, the weather, noise, any kind of distraction.”

En plein air rapping, as Fiasco calls it – after the school of painting that was popularized by Impressionists like Monet and Renoir – involves going to a promising location and fishing for lyrics and beats. He has been fine-turning the practice ever since he came on as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 2022-23 academic year – ghotiing throughout MIT , in LA, and elsewhere, while also teaching it to his students. “It’s a practice that I’ve been using and playing with and working through for the past few years,” he said.

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Readers respond to Emma Beddington’s article that asked why people find the name of the interim pope, Kevin Farrell, funny

In Germany, the name Kevin has become something of a joke ( The interim pope is a guy called Kevin. Why do people find that funny?, 28 April ). It became very popular in the early 90s, especially among east Germans (particularly in Saxony) and less sophisticated westerners who wanted a supposedly cool name for their sons. Daughters were often named Carmen or Chantal.

So many teachers developed a bias, assuming that these students had an Ossi background and/or working-class parents, and would probably not be academically promising. Nowadays there is the saying “Kevin isn’t a name, it’s a diagnosis”, and “My name is Kevin – so what?” Men change their name in order to get a good job. A pity, really.
Marion Clay
Berlin

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Ahead of a London theatre run in May, Ultravox singer says 1985 charity gig probably couldn’t happen today because of low attention spans

Sitting in the royal box at London’s Wembley Stadium, just shy of the 40th anniversary of the Live Aid concert that he helped make happen here, Midge Ure ponders its legacy. “We created a monster,” he says. “And it had to happen.”

The two Live Aid shows in London and Philadelphia on 13 July 1985, featuring performances by U2, Queen, David Bowie and more, form the core of the stage musical Just for One Day. Today, it was announced that it will transfer to London’s West End in May, after short runs at London’s Old Vic in 2024 and Toronto earlier this year.

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Pearson, who will be the first disabled actor to play the role in a film, said: ‘I can think of no greater honour than to tell the true story of Joseph Carey Merrick’

Adam Pearson, the actor who appeared in Under the Skin and the Oscar-nominated A Different Man , is to play the lead role in a new adaptation of The Elephant Man.

According to Variety , Pearson will play Joseph Merrick, whose physical disfigurement led to him becoming a freak show exhibit and then a notable figure in late Victorian London, in a film based on the celebrated play by Bernard Pomerance that became a hit in London and New York after premiering in 1977. Pomerance’s son Moby is writing the screenplay, and shooting is due to begin in 2026.

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Exclusive: Black Sabbath frontman details training he is doing to ensure he is fit to play all-star reunion gig in July

Amid concerns about his health, Ozzy Osbourne has insisted he will perform in July at what is being billed as his final concert, fronting the original lineup of Black Sabbath.

Speaking along with his bandmates to the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis in an interview to be published on Friday, he said: “I’ll be there, and I’ll do the best I can. So all I can do is turn up.”

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The band’s rightwing critics are now cancel culture advocates, while defenders demand limitless free speech

• Dorian Lynskey is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute

Earlier this year, the Northern Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap appeared to be entering their respectable phase. Their self-titled film, a raucous semi-fictionalised biopic directed by Rich Peppiatt, won a Bafta for outstanding British debut, while Kemi Badenoch’s attempt to block a grant awarded by the British Phonographic Industry was overturned in court . As the film illustrates, Kneecap were accustomed to being denounced by unionist MPs but both sides reaped useful publicity. “We have a very dysfunctional, symbiotic relationship,” admitted rapper Naoise Ó Cairealláin.

This process was dramatically derailed last week when Kneecap touched the third rail of Gaza and accused Israel of genocide on stage at Coachella festival in California. Cue fury from Fox News, calls for their visas to be revoked and, according to their manager, death threats. The British press combed through old videos and found clips that appear to show two explosive onstage pronouncements from Kneecap’s November 2023 UK tour: “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” and “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”

Dorian Lynskey is a writer, podcaster and author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute and The Ministry of Truth

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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History and autobiography are brilliantly intertwined as the Booker-winning author explores the choices and chance connections that shape our existence

At the start of this boldly experimental memoir, the Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan visits the site of a Japanese labour camp where his late father was interned during the second world war and where he ends up awkwardly having his photo taken with a former guard, Mr Sato. The war ended weeks after the US launched an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 60,000 people in less than a minute. That bomb also led to Flanagan’s father, then days from death, being freed, which in turn allowed him to father a child who would grow up to become a writer. “How many people need to die in order that you might read this book?” Flanagan asks.

Question 7, named after a riddle posed by Chekhov, is a book about the connections and choices that shape our lives, for better or worse. Flanagan is the narrator, his reading by turns mournful, reflective and quizzical as he plots a path through the lives of his parents, the writer HG Wells, Wells’s sometime inamorata, Rebecca West, and the physicist Leo Szilard, who masterminded the nuclear chain reaction that was instrumental in the creation of the bomb. These historical vignettes are intertwined with Flanagan’s own childhood memories of life in Tasmania, an island with a troubled history, and culminate in his account of a near-death experience at the age of 21, when his kayak became wedged underwater. As he assesses his own complex heritage and those of pivotal figures from the past, Flanagan reflects that “there is no memory without shame”.

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