When Nick Mohammed first toured his latest live offering, Show Pony, in spring this year, he’d already filmed The Celebrity Traitors. He made reference to it from the stage, with the kind of twinkle that made this audience member think: “Ooh, I’ll bet he gets far in it!” Which would be no surprise: as well as being a comedian, Mohammed has been performing feats of magic, memory and mental acuity on stage for years. A sharp intelligence with a very unassuming demeanour: surely this is just the sort to prosper on TV’s most popular game of deception, detection and under-the-radar un-puzzling?
Who knew that – far from winning the thing – Mohammed would enter Traitors lore, in a finale for the ages, as the man who threw it all away, snatching defeat from the jaws of bezzie-mates glory with his fellow “hundie”, the rugby player Joe Marler? Either way, Mohammed – for years an act I referred to as “comedy’s best kept secret” – has had his breakout moment, a fabulously funny man who’s become a household name in the least likely fashion. That is especially satisfying to those who’ve followed his work since the early 2010s, when Mohammed emerged on the roster’s of the UK’s hippest comedy agency – but never fitted in there, and frankly, has seldom fitted in elsewhere either.
That agency was the Invisible Dot, the same stable that gave us Tim Key. It specialised in achingly cool and offbeat standup for the graduate set – “a type of comedy which I don’t always find funny,” a rather un-collegiate Mohammed told me in 2015. His sympathies were always more mainstream: he cited as his inspiration Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, French & Saunders, and, er, the ice skaters Torvill and Dean. How on earth was this man (fresh from his PhD studies in seismology, of all things) going to fit into modern comedy?
He carved a niche with a series of shows more or less in character as his bumptious alter ego Mr Swallow, a camp northern know-all now in character as Houdini, performing extraordinary feats of escapology; and elsewhere (flanked by sidekicks David Elms and Kieran Hodgson) as the lead in a spoof Dracula musical. Alongside these, a series of simpler shows, in which PowerPoint, conjuring and camp character comedy combined to seductive but somewhat evasive effect. Who was Mr Swallow? Mohammed never explained it. Who was Nick Mohammed? He almost never performed entirely as himself.
All the while, he was becoming a familiar if discreet TV face – on shows such as Miranda and Stath Lets Flats, and in his own cybercrime sitcom Intelligence, co-starring David Schwimmer. Videos of his contributions to 8 Out of 10 Cats went viral – such as the one in which he sets words to the theme tune of the movie Jurassic Park. Mohammed’s profile rocketed, though, with the success of fish-out-of-water football comedy Ted Lasso, in which he starred as the meek kit man turned malevolent rival manager Nate.
But until The Celebrity Traitors, the 45-year-old’s transition from sitcom success to national treasure was proving a bumpy one. An appearance at the 2024 Bafta awards ceremony went badly askew (“Bafta viewers cringe,” ran the headlines, “as Mr Swallow skit leaves crowd looking confused”), and a major West End run of his Charles Dickens spoof A Christmas Carol(ish) fell foul of a disastrous opening night, which collapsed in tears and awkwardness after repeated technical failures.
How satisfying, then, that this most idiosyncratic of artists (part Renaissance man, part shapeshifter) has now carved himself a niche in the public’s affections – and by improbable means, too, which was the only way he was ever likely to do so. The fascinating thing, for comedy-watchers, will be to see what effect this all has on Mohammed’s live work. Show Pony, which is still touring, is a sensational experience, partly because, for the first time in his career, something of the “real” Mohammed peeks out, very playfully, from behind Mr Swallow’s mask – to address (again, for the first time) his race, his background, his career standing.
To Mohammed uninitiates, I can’t recommend that show highly enough. He may be worried, as Ed Gamble reported on Traitors Uncloaked, that “everyone’s going to hate me” after betraying his bromance with Marler and scuppering the Faithful’s prospects on TV on Thursday. But for audiences who’ve followed his career, and who see Show Pony, that couldn’t be further from the truth. We love Mohammed: he’s a wonderful entertainer, and his newfound prominence is richly deserved.
Nick Mohammed: Show Pony is on tour from 8-11 November and 9 April-20 June
