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.
