Andy Milligan

Mark Silcox’s Uncle Shady gets the laughs in the fifth series of Man Like Mobeen (2017), even when the crime plot becomes difficult to follow. We grew impatient with the explanations, because they kept interrupting the comedy we were enjoying. Creators and co-writers Andy Milligan and Guz Khan have enough good jokes to make this a qualified recommendation. Their comic performers are the reason to stay, although the writing does not always give them enough room.

Milligan moved into scripted comedy after years of writing gags for Ant & Dec, including on Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. He co-created and co-wrote Undercover (2015), about an undercover policeman infiltrating an Armenian crime family. Man Like Mobeen followed, with its former drug dealer navigating faith, family and crime in Birmingham. The change asks more of a writer than finding the next punchline, particularly when the audience must follow a criminal plot as well as the characters.

The first series of Man Like Mobeen has four episodes; the fifth has six, still a compact space for comedy and crime drama. Yet Milligan and Khan fill that space with more complications than the story needs. Some adolescent jokes also become wearying, a reminder that keeping the laughs coming is not simply a matter of adding more. We would rather spend longer with the successful comic performances than work through another explanation of what is happening.

For Stuffed (2025), Milligan wrote for Khan again, giving him a man trying to salvage a family trip to Lapland after a mistaken bonus. Milligan created, wrote and executive-produced the Christmas comedy-drama. It is another premise built to get a character into trouble, though we would not judge the result from the set-up. We would be interested to see what these collaborators could do with a quieter predicament.