Nick Mohammed: Life after Celebrity Traitors and on bringing Mr Swallow back to Yorkshire

If you haven’t seen Mr Swallow he’s a little difficult to explain. He’s almost a cracking showman, just a few degrees off. He presented a now infamous section at the 2024 BAFTA awards - if you Google his name and the awards ceremony, almost every result that’s returned includes the word ‘cringe’. A lot of the audience, both in the auditorium and at home, didn’t quite get the joke that Mr Swallow isn’t supposed to be very good at presenting, his high pitched voice and tendency to swallow loudly (hence the name) between sentences, less than ideal for the role. The live and television audience took Mr Swallow at face value, and, well, cringe.

Mr Swallow is a brilliant comic invention, you might also have seen his viral clip where he puts lyrics to the theme of Jurassic Park on Eight Out of Ten Cats Does Countdown. The man who invented him, Nick Mohammed, is a heck of a lot more slick, polished and deeply intelligent than Swallow - although that hasn’t prevented him turning up for an interview with me 200 miles south of the mark today.

The irony is that a few days later, I see Show Pony, his one-man Mr Swallow show, along with a sold out audience at Leeds Grand Theatre, and the whole reason the show works is that Mohammed has an iron grip on the mechanics of the situation and understands every minute detail. Had he been in charge of the logistics of our interview, I doubt he’d have landed quite so far away from where I was expecting him to be.

Apologies out of the way, we decide to chat via zoom, so we can see each other and, not quite in the flesh, but behind the masks of any of the characters he plays on television or stage, he is surprisingly fresh faced and sharp. From Nathan Shelley in Ted Lasso to the role he plays opposite David Schwimmer in Intelligence, the Sky One show which he created, wrote and stars in, he tends to play something of an underdog. Casting directors have clearly decided he’s more comedy sidekick than leading man material, but the bloke on the other end of the zoom call could easily lead a show.

“It’s only relatively recently, the last year or so, that I feel I’ve been able to say I want to go for certain sorts of roles. This was a big step because when I started out I would go up for characters called ‘Abdul’ and I get it, but it’s great that I can go up for characters called Nathan, or Joseph or Malcolm,” says Mohammed, who has indeed played characters named all of the above.

It opens up an interesting conversation that he will continue on stage in his latest addition to the Mr Swallow oeuvre. In Show Pony he tackles head on the fact that the British TV industry wants to cast him as South Asian characters when he, in fact, isn’t.

“I get to have a bit of fun with it and as Mr Swallow I have licence to do it, but I’m not South Asian,” says Mohammed, somewhat surprisingly.

“My dad is Indo-Caribbean, but he was born and raised in Trinidad and my mum’s from Cyprus, so really I should identify far more as Cypriot than South Asian,” he says. “People choose to identify me as that because it suits my surname and the colour of my skin, I don’t mind it, but it means I get to have a bit of fun back with it.

“I don’t see it as a bad thing of course, and if I can support people from unrepresented groups then great, I just wouldn’t want to be hypocritical and represent a community I’m not really a part of.”

He definitely has fun with it in the stage show Show Pony, which pulls off a very deft comedy bit about a meeting with a BBC exec who encourages Mohammed to ‘lean into’ his South Asian heritage, while he wants to do anything but.

The show, when he performed it at Leeds Grand last summer, represented a pretty triumphant homecoming for Mohammed. His last two tours also came to Leeds, but were hosted at the City Varieties, a venue that holds less than half the number that packed into Leeds Grand. Mohammed said that there would be an extra frisson to the performance because Leeds, and specifically Abbey Grange High School, is where he first began his performing life. It may surprise those who know him as a comedian and actor to discover that Mohammed’s way into showbiz was via magic.

I mention that I had been speaking to Steven Frayne, formerly Dynamo, earlier about his own journey and Mohammed immediately becomes animated.

“I’ve known Steven since he was like 14, I’m a couple of years older than him, but we were both part of the Bradford Magic Circle so yeah we’ve known each other for years,” he says. “I know Steve talks about magic as a defence mechanism and it was similar for me. Not that I was bullied at school, but it was definitely a way of surviving. I have such distinct memories of being at Abbey Grange particularly around GCSE years, when you’re 15 or 16 and if you are a little bit different it can be tricky. I was short, a bit camp, brown, did magic tricks, so you become a bit of a target. I remember quite distinctly doing design and tech GCSE and it was basically me and all the school bullies who were in the class and Mr Pike the teacher said ‘come on Nick, get the cards out’. Keeping them entertained with card tricks kept them at bay and it definitely felt like a superpower.”

Having made it through to the final of Celebrity Traitors, the power of the series was demonstrated when, within weeks, he announced new additional dates to Show Pony, which would be going back out on the road in 2026. The new dates start in Liverpool in April, coming to Bradford Live in May and to Leeds Grand again twice in June.

Given that his CV is becoming ever more eclectic, it’s perhaps a surprise that he would go back out on the road. “There is a thrill in performing live and if I could only ever do one thing for the rest of my life, I would choose to do live performance because there is some sort of electricity with performing live,” he says.

“Particularly with comedy, there’s something to do with the immediate communication of an idea and the reaction from an audience, whether, frankly, that’s negative or positive. You know immediately. With television or film there are so many people involved and while it can be rewarding, theres something about the live environment and audiences being different every night. Particularly with Show Pony and Mr Swallow, there’s s good chance that 40 percent are there because they’ve seen me in something else so I have to convince them this is a night worth coming out for. Then when the audience do find it funny and we’re all in it together, it’s a really lovely feeling.”

It’s a feeling even more audiences will get thanks to the inexorable rise of Nick Mohammed. And the good news if you book a ticket is that he will almost certainly be at the right venue on the night you go see him.

Show Pony, Bradford Live, May 23 and Leeds Grand Theatre, June 2 and 5.