It’s Halloween in Hounslow. Sorry, Halaloween – it also happens to be Eid. A white working-class vampire called Kathy (Jaime Winstone) who doubles as a part-time dominatrix on disability benefits is on the prowl for some halal blood. She’s got a thing for Muslims, you see. (Also Hindus, it transpires.) She has tried Jewish blood, Buddhist blood, Christian blood and an increasing amount of atheist blood. But halal blood is the best. As for halal virgin blood “It’s like Christmas!” she hisses, baring her fangs. Mind you, as the British-Pakistanis point out in the opening moments of Count Abdulla before their necks are duly sucked, it would have been more culturally appropriate if she had referenced Ramadan instead.
Welcome to the could-be-extremely-dodgy premise of Kaamil Shah’s six-part vampire comedy. The series would be unthinkable if it wasn’t made by brown people who know what they are doing, and at one point even deploy the P-word in a way that isn’t gratuitous or misplaced but just plain old racist. After all, on paper how do we feel about laughing at racist vampires? Vampires who, at the other end of the class spectrum, are portrayed as a bunch of white supremacist toffs desperate to protect the bloodline from racial impurity? Is it OK? Then again, if Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson could do the whole cultural reference-rammed lovable spoofy sitcom thing more than 20 years ago with Spaced, why the hell not? The hour for Muslim vampires cometh.
Count Abdulla turns all the vampire tropes on their heads – and then, yes, sucks those heads dry. It’s very satisfying and sometimes really works,for example, when it turns out that many of the white supremacist vampires are working for “Her Majesty’s Coven” as Home Office and border control officials. Essentially, white people are the villains, it is a woman going around biting and objectifying brown men’s “milk chocolate skin”, and brown people get in on a genre in which we haven’t exactly been well represented. “They like Muslims,” groans one of Kathy’s victims from a hospital bed. “At least someone does in this climate,” a Black doctor replies.
Abdulla Khan, in a strong performance by Arian Nik, is a classic bumbling reluctant hero. He is a junior doctor and hapless virgin – with access to the NHS blood bank and extra tasty blood, then. He fancies fellow doctor Amrita but she is deep in a white boy phase. Special mention goes to her horrific boyfriend Frank, “straight, white, South African and woke – a real unicorn!”, who has a habit of whitesplaining arranged marriage and mispronouncing “desi”. There are some solid cultural appropriation jokes: at Amrita’s Halloween party, a posh white boy accused of dressing up as a colonialist protests, “I’m a 19th-century infantryman!” Elsewhere the gags land less lightly, as if every woke reference in 2020s Britain must be referenced, mined, then crossed off.
Kathy bites Abdulla at the end of episode one and, though there is only a minuscule chance of viral transmission, turns him into a vampire. Oh dear. Immediately, he starts looking “pale enough to be on top of the arranged marriage market”. He loses his reflection, can’t stop staring longingly at his cousin Shafi’s neck, and starts spewing blood after eating his mum’s garlic naan. Meanwhile, Kathy is pursued by the vampire “Bullingdon Club” who demand that she drives a wooden stake through Abdulla’s heart, or they will. High-jinks ensue. There is an exorcism cribbed from the internet that turns out to be “The power of Christ compels you” speech from The Exorcist translated into Arabic. A phoney Hindu yogi vampire who has gone “vegetarian” – he only drinks animal blood – and is trying to tantric shag (and bite) his class of white yummy mummies saves the day. And, of course, there’s a big Indian wedding.
Count Abdulla doesn’t always work. Playing with stereotypes can, after all, come dangerously close to setting yourself on fire. But it gains in confidence as it goes on. Thanks to Shah’s deft writing, it mostly pulls off the high-wire act of being woke, funny, topical and really silly all at once. By the time it all comes to a bloody head in the multi-faith room at Heathrow, I am completely – sorry – sucked in. Count Abdulla may not be as hilarious as Black Ops or as joyous as We Are Lady Parts, but it shares their fondness for a very British kind of farce, satire and skill in making light work of the very heavy reality of historical and systemic racism. How wonderful that the woke sitcom is becoming a defiantly silly genre of its own.
• Count Abdulla is on ITVX.
