'I'M DONE WITH REALITY'

Mawaan Rizwan discusses the fantastical return of his hit BBC sitcom, Juice

- WILL RICHARDS

It took a whole decade for the TV industry to catch on to Mawaan Rizwan's ambition. His hilarious, surreal sitcom Juice, which has just released its second season on the BBC, existed in multiple forms before it was finally commissioned for TV, including as a highly aspiring Edinburgh Fringe show in 2018.

“I wanted to make a TV show where there were surreal set-pieces where the physical world around this character would start walking and changing depending on his emotions,” the Pakistan-born, east London-raised actor says, sitting outside at London’s Somerset House on one of the last days of a long summer. “Everyone told me, ‘No, that’s too expensive. That’s too impractical. You can’t do that on a British comedy budget. Write something simpler.”

With his pride dented but his dreams still firmly intact, he made a career first as a YouTuber, then a stand-up comic, a Taskmaster favourite, a writer for shows including Netflix smash Sex Education, a budding musician and beyond. “I’d write and pitch other stuff,” he says, but Juice “really was my baby, and the kind of show I would like to watch. That’s the kind of stuff that stands the test of time.”

In his career as a writer, Rizwan felt cornered into writing one-dimensional stories based on his own background as a queer first-generation immigrant. “There was stuff that I wanted to write, but wasn’t being given permission,” he says. “For many years, I was told, as a Brown writer, as a queer writer, you must write those stories. Those stories are often really on the nose, though. When you’re given a brief to write about a character from a marginalised background, often that character is not interesting because they have to be a goody two-shoes, or they have to compensate for a society where there’s an imbalance regarding that marginalised person. The piece of TV ends up becoming this vehicle to right the wrongs of society, when an actually interesting story is of a character with flaws.”