Alice Jones
Escapology can seriously endanger your life, but Nick Mohammed seems to have lots of other amusing talents to play with, finds
Not many comedians can claim to have nearly died in pursuit of a laugh. Nick Mohammed can, but perhaps that’s what you get when you combine comedy with escapology.
Mohammed’s last live show, Mr Swallow: Houdini, was a spoof musical tribute to the great magician, which climaxed with him having to escape from a padlocked water tank while handcuffed. He trained for it for months beforehand, using freediving techniques to learn to hold his breath for two minutes and increase his CO₂ tolerance.
“The one thing you’re not meant to do is breathe out because if you do, your reflex takes over, you breathe in and you drown,” he says cheerily. “It was genuinely hairy. It never became second nature.”
One night, at Soho Theatre in London, it went wrong. “I just couldn’t get out,” he says. “That was it. It happened at a point where I was very ready to breathe.”
His castmates had to help him out but he still finished the show. At the end he apologised to the audience for ruining the illusion. “It was a shame because that show was really good,” he says.
This month, Mohammed, 37, returnstotheedinburghfringefora sedate half-hour of storytelling. Just kidding.he’sbackwithanevenmore ambitious one-man show in which he will attempt another Houdini illusion – vanishing an elephant – while in character, telling jokes.
Fans of Mohammed – comedian, actor, writer, musician and member of the Magic Circle – will know that his comedy shows are rarely just that. In his 2010 show, he also played violin and memorised a deck of cards. In 2012, he did gymnastics and solved a Rubik’s Cube in seconds flat. For Dracula! in 2014 he wrote a musical and performed large sections of it on roller skates. In 2016, it was the Chinese Water Torture Cell.
“I get a genuine thrill from trying stuff out that feels challenging,” says Mohammed. His childhood hero was Michael Crawford, for the ease with which he moved from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em to Phantom of the Opera. “He’s a triple, quadruple threat – I thought, ‘that’s really cool’. And how thrilling as an audience to watch that, to know that someone has gone to those lengths.”
Mohammed doesn’t really need to go to the lengths he does; he is rarely off-screen. As well as regular appearances in comedies such as Camping, Uncle and Cuckoo, he played Nasa’s head of communications in The Martian opposite Matt Damon and stole scenes in Absolutely Fabulous: the Movie – he played Caspar, the stressed-out, long-haired PA – and Bridget Jones’ Baby, where he was the unwilling gooseberry on a very awkwarddinnerdate.thissummer, heplayspigletindisney’sbig-budget Christopher Robin, opposite Ewan Mcgregor.
And yet, something keeps pulling him back to his unique comic creation Mr Swallow, a huffy Northern chatterbox who, has over the years, turned his hand to motivational speaking, musical theatre and magic with invariably poor results. As a rule, he gets fatally distracted, preposterously irritated,pondershowtopronounce “satsuma” and says things like: “Ooh, I could murder a Shloer.”
I have loved Mr Swallow ever since I first saw him in the back room of a pub in Islington a decade ago, when for ten minutes all he did was complain about how hot the room was in increasingly outraged tones. For those still unaware of his charms, though, whoishe?
“He’s born to be on stage, one of those people who has huge delusions of grandeur. Like a cruiseship entertainer – top of the bill in quite a small environment. He feels like he could do anything and he has an opinion on everything.”
The character is based on a bolshie teacher at his school in Leeds, who treated the classroom as a theatre. “The way I’d describe her is that she would always act as if she’d just been heckled.”
Mr Swallow and the Vanishing Elephant marks Mohammed’s return to a one-man show after two musicals with a small cast. He refuses to give any spoilers. “From an animal rights point of view, I would never have an elephant on stage, but Mr Swallow has gone to great lengths …” The set is enormous and elaborate and there is real conjuring involved. “It’s Mr Swallow’s take on a magic show, Paul Daniels-style. It’s about him having fun with the grandness of the show even if he’s not quite up to scratch.”
After his run at the Fringe, Mohammed will film a sitcom pilot for Channel 4 in which Mr Swallow gets his own television vehicle. “I want it to feel like Swallow doing Noel’s House Party. That makes me laugh, just imagining him on that set, being live, not being able to deal with the time pressures and earpieces and autocue.”
Unlikely as it sounds, it was the hapless Swallow who led to Mohammed’s role in The Martian when the casting agent Nina Gold saw Dracula! at the Fringe with her son. His casting as Piglet was similarly unusual. He was called in to read for a smaller part but several weeks later got a call asking him to record some voices for Piglet on his phone.
“A week later I got a phone call saying, ‘You’re playing Piglet.’ I couldn’t believe it and I still can’t.”
I can confirm that his Piglet voice (“I can’t look at you while I’m doing it. It’s too embarrassing” ) is perfect – breathy, high-pitched and hesitant.
Mohammed was born in Leeds. His mother, a retired GP, is from Cyprus, his father, from Trinidad, works in law. Aged four, he was given a magic set and was hooked. He joined the Junior Northern Magic Circle and spent his teenage years perfecting tricks and attending conventions. At Durham University, where he failed to get into the Comedy Revue, he would perform at student events, hotels and clubs, all the while writing comedy.
His break came – and you can’t say this about many performers – when he went to do a PHD at Cambridge in seismology. He joined Footlights, where his cohort included the future Inbetweeners Joe Thomas and Simon Bird, and got a part in the 2004 tour show.
“I’d been to the Faroe Islands to do four weeks of fieldwork beforehand. I came back to Cambridge and I remember looking at the Bullard laboratories absolutely knowing that would be the last time I’d be walking out of that building.”
It was. He was spotted by Caroline Raphael, then comedy commissioner at Radio 4, who in turn introduced him to his agent. He moved to London and temped at Morgan Stanley for a couple of years – secretly sneaking out to auditions – until he got his first proper job, in the BBC comedy Billy Goat.
He still dabbles in magic, and is always learning new tricks. “There’s always a magic book on my bedside table,” he says. He doesn’t perform so much.
“I’ve been on telly so it’s weird if I show up at a wedding with a deck of cards, saying, ‘Do you mind if I show you a trick?’” His last “professional” gig was doing card tricks at Simon Bird’s wedding.
Aside from the Mr Swallow sitcom, he has several other scripts in the pipeline including GCHQ, which has a big Hollywood star attached, and an animation for Sony. Morning Has Broken, the daytime television sitcom he wrote with Julia Davis, never made it to screen on Channel 4. “We’re looking into it.”
Before that, he has an elephant to disappear. And he’s already thinking about the next challenge. “I’d love to tightrope walk for another show. Taking on something really difficult and just nailing it – brilliant. I would get a thrill from watching that.”