I live in a UK town constantly made fun of but it's actually got the funniest locals

Comedy duos throughout history don’t come less likely than Omid Djalili and Ed Sheeran. But that’s exactly what the 59-year-old British-Iranian funnyman, and the global hitmaker, 34, from Suffolk, have become after joining forces for Sheeran’s Persian-inspired music video Azizam.

The surprising collaboration, in which the Shape Of You singer-songwriter is transported to an Iranian wedding where he meets Djalili playing a chef, led the two men to bond over their love of Ipswich. Having moved there from London during the pandemic in order to downsize, Djalili promptly fell in love with the town and its surroundings, while Sheeran, who lives in a £3.75million mansion outside Framlingham where he grew up, is a lifelong Ipswich Town FC fan.

Now the pair are collaborating once again on a major new comedy to be filmed in… you’ve guessed it, Ipswich. And Djalili, who previously expressed a wish for Sheeran to write its theme tune, is clearly thrilled about it, even if he’s keeping the details a secret.

“The idea has really ignited the town and everyone behind it,” he tells the Daily Express, revealing Sheeran “emails me every day”.

“Ipswich Council gave some money towards it, and now we have Ed Sheeran backing it, he absolutely loves the idea. He basically says: ‘We’ve got to get this over the line’.”

Why the excitement? “Ipswich is often the punchline to people’s jokes. But actually, when you live here, it’s an amazing place, and the people are so funny. I just really hope that we’ll get it over the line, then you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

Djalili, who made his comedy breakthrough in 1995 at the Edinburgh Fringe with Short, Fat Kebab Shop Owner’s Son – a show about his experiences of growing up in Britain – has always veered effortlessly between different worlds.

A fixture on TV, he’s also starred in blockbusters including Gladiator, The Mummy, Notting Hill and The World Is Not Enough. And right now, inbetween celebrating the delights of Ipswich, he’s dissecting the dire situation in the Middle East on his current world tour stretching from New York to Shrewsbury.

Having played venues across Canada, Australia and the US, he is quick to name his favourite date so far: Loughborough.

“It was a sold-out show, and they’d seen me before, and the majority of people had come back to see the new show, and that was, I would say, the best show of the tour.

“Loughborough, of all places, Loughborough…that’s my comedy town,” he adds with a chuckle from his home during a brief break to his gruelling schedule.

Djalili’s show is called Namaste but it embraces the cerebral comic’s “inner anger” at global injustices, drawing on the word’s Sanskrit roots rather than its colloquial peace and love-style greeting. But how to keep deeply political comedy up to date when every social media post by President Trump threatens to rip up the global status quo?

“I’m genuinely worried that if I do a joke now, if I think of a joke, is it going to be relevant soon?” he admits. “When you do a joke, you want to know it will stick. In general, you have to keep your eyes on social media, and keep your eyes on the news.

“But it’s exciting. You can remove some stuff that is no longer relevant. So it’s always a juggling act.”

No topics are off the table, although the show focuses on that thorniest of issues, the Middle East.

As a member of the Iranian faith Baha’i, whose parents left Iran for London in 1958, Djalili brings a uniquely nuanced perspective to conflicts that threaten “unimaginable horrors” for the world at large. And somehow, he manages to make it funny.

The toughest date was Seattle. “It was an 800-seat venue and only 350 people showed up. So I was like, ‘Why are we even here?’” he recalls. “The show started and the front row are usually excited. These guys all had their arms folded. I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be hard.’

“But in the end, it went really well, and there was a standing ovation. And then all the people, including the security and technical people, wanted a selfie.

“And I said, ‘Why? Why do you want a selfie now?’ And they just said, ‘Well, we laughed and we learned’.” The compliment stuck with Djalili because his humour is never gratuitous, even when it steps close to the line. In fact, it could be considered his contribution to resolving some of the issues currently wracking the troubled globe.

“It’s basically a load of jokes that make space for moving up towards the end of the show, which is a real take on what’s going on,” he says of the show’s structure.

“In a sense, I’m also challenging the audience that if there’s something you don’t like, maybe it’s because you’ve seen things through a certain lens. And Britishness is a lens. It’s my lens too. But I think if you have a great joke that deals with people’s fears, nothing really beats that. I really do believe in the transformative power of comedy.”

Does he ever worry about being cancelled in today’s over-sensitive world? “In this show, I say things that probably leave me worthy of being ‘cancelled’ but I’m just too old to worry about it. And they did try once already,” he shrugs.

Today comics’ careers can be ruined over ill-received remarks on the day’s cause célèbre, but Djalili had a brush with a far darker form of “cancellation” which is at risk of being forgotten amid inconsequential rows over pronouns. “I was cancelled before the days of ‘cancel culture’. And I was cancelled just because I was Middle Eastern,” he recalls of 9/11 and its immediate aftermath.

“There was no appetite to see a Middle Eastern comedian on a major sitcom, which I was on at the time...that show just went, it was never bought back. I was one of the lead roles.”

He’s referring to the short-lived Channel 4 comedy Small Potatoes, an episode of which was unfortunately scheduled to air on the day of the era-defining tragedy.

“The show, we thought, was temporarily abandoned for a while. But actually it turned out it was permanently abandoned and we thought that maybe it wasn’t appropriate to have comedy when we’ve had this terrible world event.”

He thinks for a moment. “Actually, no… it was me. And I realised that afterwards. I had a gig on September 13. My manager rang and said, ‘You’re off the show’. And I said, ‘Yeah, it was probably not appropriate.’ But then I found out later, the show went ahead – just without me.”

Fighting to restore his career as a leading stand-up in the face of what felt like open discrimination taught him “to deal with things head-on”, he says.

While the paranoid days following 9/11 are thankfully long gone, the period in comedy exile certainly didn’t teach him to steer clear of controversial topics, including the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is a special focus of the show.

“This whole evening is risky,” he admits. “But there’s a reason why we’ve come together. It is because we are at a special juncture in history, which everybody can feel.

“And it’s my good fortune that people come out to my show to get some kind of answer and some kind of hope. Right now, nobody knows [what’s going to happen], and that’s why we’re coming out. That’s why we’re seeking art, culture and literature to give us some kind of answers.

“I think that it’s always about making a crowd feel very comfortable, and then when we get into the really uncomfortable stuff, they’re comfortable and they’re laughing, which is just, just music to my ears.”

But he isn’t confined to heavyweight comedy pushing the boundaries around politically acceptable jokes, of course. Djalili was initially reluctant to appear in a music video with an unnamed singer – until his agent discovered on the grapevine that it was none other than Sheeran who had come calling.

“I said, ‘Of course, I’ll do it. I’ll do it for free, not a problem,’” recalls Djalili. “And then when they explained the concept to me, I was very moved by it. Because, Ed Sheeran is very non-political, but it was his way of paying tribute to Persian culture at a time where Iran is so geopolitically involved in all the terrible things that are going on in the world…So people have a terrible impression of Iran.

“But here’s Ed Sheeran, who wants to pay tribute to the people, because he says, ‘The people are not the government. The people of Iran are not the government of Iran,’” he repeats in what is evidently sincere agreement.

As for Ipswich, another local lad – none other than Ralph Fiennes – is also being tapped up to appear as the local university chancellor in the series. So perhaps there is potential for it to become a future retreat for the rich and famous. What does Djalili think?

“When you walk around Ipswich, you feel like you’re on holiday, because it’s so beautiful,” adds the comic, before breaking into a cheeky grin. “But there are still parts which are awful!

For tickets, visit omidnoagenda.com