BAZ ASHMAWY
50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy’s Baz Ashmawy was filming a new series Wingman when the Covid-19 crisis hit.
HE SAYS ‘It’s been OK , we got through it — it’s been all right. My mam was in lockdown with my sister for quite a while and I went to visit a couple of times with my youngest and we found it really difficult. We are really tactile people so we found it really difficult not being able to give her a big hug or a squeeze. I suppose I always felt a little bit low when I left her but she’s been great.
‘She is in great form now, thank God the worst period is gone, for the moment at least.
‘My mum is very independent. She goes back and forward all the time to a place in the Canaries she has. She is very social, she has a lot of mates, and then all of a sudden all that is taken away from her so I think
she found that quite difficult. ‘Mum was a nurse for 50 years, so has a great mindset and has a good head on her shoulders and she knew what had to be done, but she was delighted when they were allowed to go back out and start walking round a bit more. Seeing the grandkids was a really big thing for her, as it was for all grandparents.’
With filming of his latest series of Wingman on hold, Baz took to playing the roles of cook, cleaner, butler and best dad in his blended family.
He is married to Tanya Evans, who he met in 2006. Baz has two biological children — Mahy, seven, and ten-year-old Hannah — with Tanya, and he is also stepdad to Tanya’s children from a previous relationship, Charlotte, Harry, Jake and Amelia.
‘We had six, two of them have left the coop. They were isolating on their own. The next oldest lad was isolating with his dad so I had the three girls.
‘It was interesting. I have a seven-year old and she was just underneath my armpit every day. She was my shadow or I was like her man-butler. I’d watch movies with her, do her homework with her, do her Zoom, hang out, paint, draw pictures.
‘I came out realising how achingly she wanted to be with me and that was kind of hard a little bit because I was thinking “God, I’m always working all the time and she is obviously wanting goothis’. So now I’ve started to go back to work she is down
in mouth a little bit. I think we will have to look at that and make some adjustments and just be home a little bit more for her.
‘My thing is I never cooked. Tanya is a chef. She was a chef before and she is a fantastic cook, so it’s not something I ever did. And when there is eight of you in the family it takes all the romance out of it, it takes all the fun out of it, especially kids — they all want different things and there’s all the “I don’t want this, and I don’t want that” so I just never cooked. But a lot of people were like “oh, Shakespeare wrote King Lear in a pandemic” and I was like f*** off, because I was coming up with absolutely nothing creative whatsoever.
‘I had two goals for the whole of Covid. One was I was going to cook and the other was I was going to clear out my shed because they were going to have to talk me down off the roof if I didn’t clear out my shed. I was a good two and a half months in before I got to the shed, but I got there in the end.
‘And I was really good at the cooking,
I’ve been a wasted talent for the past few years. My missus laughs at me because I can’t do anything else while I’m cooking. I can’t have a conversation at all, there’s no multi-tasking going on, just me cooking.
‘It wasn’t a massively creative time for me, it was more a reflective time. What’s important to you in your life? If you went to Tibet to find yourself you would go through the same type of thing. Lockdown meant you were forced into this period of self-reflection . I took a lot of good from it. I found the first few weeks very hard but after that I found it very beneficial.
‘I’ve got a new series of Wingman starting. Last year after doing Wingman I was so inspired by one of the guys. He was a farmer who wanted to be an actor, so I decided I wanted to do a stage tour, to do stand-up so we were halfway through that when
Covid hit. I was thinking
“look at this guy putting himself out there. Fear is an awful thing, it’s a huge obstacle for people that stops them from doing things or even trying to do things for fear of failure.
‘We’ve had a few birthdays, a 16th and an 18th and my tenyear-old, so the guys were all together for her birthday. It’s funny as we have such a wide spread of kids, it’s like watching the end of a movie. I’m looking at the seven-year-old and thinking “I know what you’re going to end up like ten years from now and you’re going to be driving me mental”. They’re all at different stages but I love all the parts of parenting, it’s nice to see them grow up and go off into the world.’