Comics of colour are hitting back at tokenism, stereotyping and people mispronouncing their names, with a mould-breaking new show. We meet the team behind it
Leila Navabi has always loved gameshows and panel comedies but she could never see a space for herself in them. “I grew up watching Mock the Week,” she says “But as a little brown girl in Cardiff, I never thought I’d participate in that sort of comedy.” She wanted to break the mould and create something more inclusive. But, wary that this might be seen as a token gameshow for minorities, she decided on a more subversive approach.
Enter Bameshow, a Radio 4 panel show that parodies gameshows and tokenism in comedy. In the pilot, recorded before a live audience, Desiree Burch hosts an all comics-of-colour panel – Athena Kugblenu, Ken Cheng, Kemah Bob and Amrou Al-Kadhi (AKA drag performer Glamrou) – each given free rein to playfully mock the stereotyping, bias and tick-box diversity efforts they experience in comedy.