Omar Hamdi
Welsh-Egyptian comedian/presenter/documentarian /person Omar Hamdi had a wide-ranging chat with Carl Marsh that takes in writing, comedy, and an upcoming documentary on the refugee crisis.
You’ve got a stand-up show coming up and you also do a lot of topical work for the TV but what do you see yourself as primarily?
I think certain people get asked that all the time, across different industries and certain people never, ever, ever get asked that and I don’t know how you join one group if you are in the other group. I don’t know what the application process is! There must be someone handling auditions to this special group of people who can do anything and whatever they do, everyone goes ‘Of course they could do that, why wouldn’t they be able to do that as he has done everything else really well’. So when David Walliams writes a children’s book, no-one goes ‘hang on a minute, why is he writing a children’s book?’ – but what is J.K. Rowling going to say; ‘How dare you disrespect the professional pedigree and generations of professional children’s writers?’
Another example is Dara Ó Briain. Do people just say is he just a happy go-lucky Irish comedian or is he a panel show host or is he a serious science presenter, or can he just do Robot Wars which is light entertainment? I see it all as the same job, whether I am doing stand-up comedy or presenting quite a serious bit of TV or whether I am producing a documentary, or even if I am writing a column for a newspaper. I have to see what is going on in the world and see the most interesting or the most ignored parts of it and help everyone else see that.
So as a presenter, would you say it’s like being on a soap-box in Hyde Park, is that what you are saying?
Well that’s not what I said, yet it’s interesting you say that, because I think a lot of presenters do make it about themselves, maybe without meaning to. A lot of the time there is this culture of having to put the presenter’s name in the title of the programme, so if a presenter is doing a programme about something that is really sad, then it’s like ‘there is the issue’ and then ‘there is the person presenting it!’, and they are equally important and equally relevant, which is bizarre when you take a step back from it. You’ve got the whole industry of agents, and producers and everyone else just wants recognisable names. A lot of the time as a presenter you can, if you are not careful, end up filling the screen and making it about you.
I guess you are telling me that ‘that’s’ not you?
That’s not me at all! That is one of the reasons why I prefer presenting to stand-up is because when I am presenting, I am facilitating other people. I hate doing pieces for camera – if you watch the things I have done on the TV and compare me to other presenters, I do very few pieces to camera where it is just me talking to the camera. I will tell directors “What is the point of that?” Wouldn’t it be more interesting to see the person that we are talking about or the situation being filmed, and then I can do voice over. My voice will give the information, I don’t need my face to fill the screen, there are more interesting things for people to stare at for 15 seconds! My job is to be the person that is out of shot or just stood next to the camera where you can only see the side of my ear, and then just to give the other person and the world something to focus on while the camera is rolling. You do get some people who are all about themselves and their journey, yet the fact that they are going through a war zone is irrelevant, it’s all about “their” journey.
Can we talk about your two new projects that you’re working on right now?
The first thing is that I am doing a stand-up special for Amazon Prime which is called Omar Hamdi: British Dream and is just inspired by the last few years of my life, especially as I have been spending a lot of time in the US, so it is a US/British culture comparison. This might tie in with the next thing – I produced [the special], as I got tired of just sitting in meetings, and I didn’t want to spend my whole life in meetings with people who I don’t know what they do! They get paid a lot of money, some of them are amazing, some of them ‘want’ to be amazing, but there is a whole sort of culture around them of ‘we can’t take risks, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we only work with certain people’.
So I started my own production company called FTI Films and the first project is the comedy special Omar Hamdi: British Dream; it is just amazing that our first project is on Amazon Prime, so for our first attempt, it’s not bad at all. Basically it is all about my best jokes over the last 5 or 6 years, there isn’t a rubbish joke in there!
So if I find a crap joke in there, am I allowed to come back to you?
Yeah, if you find a rubbish one, call me back and we will do a re-edit, we’ll do ‘Carl’s cut”.
The second thing I haven’t spoke about is something else that I have produced through FTI Films and that is a film documentary called Syriopolis. I’d heard some really quite terrifying stories about what it was like for Syrian refugees in Greece, in Athens. It all started when I was booked to host a fund-raising dinner for a charity that does stuff out there in Greece. It started off as strictly business, and I’m not one of those bleeding hearts or right-on people at all! I am not one of those people that wakes up every morning and goes ‘which crisis am I going to be upset about today?’ I am just a normal guy, like everyone else, I care but I’m just living my life. I had no intention of going [to Greece] to film this amazing meditation on the human condition or anything as pompous as that but the lady that was running the charity was just telling me some stuff, and this was casually just telling me about kids getting raped in camps in Greece.
This was happening in Greece, and in a capital city, in Athens, not even in one of the islands camps. It was so bizarre because you could spend all day in this parallel universe and then you go back to the hotel and there were tourists just comparing selfies they did in front of the Acropolis. This was absolutely like two different worlds and it was just terrible. There is a lot of child trafficking, and child abuse going on in the camps and the Greek authorities don’t seem that interested in doing anything about it. There is a lot of organ trafficking and people being murdered for their organs – the base of that is Turkey but those gangs have a presence in Greece. I interviewed one lady whose husband was murdered by organ traffickers in Turkey as it is a big business for ISIS as since when they issued a Fatwa [a religious ruling] where everyone is allowed to traffic organs if it benefits ISIS, and you could make so much money from doing it.
I guess it’s like human farming then to them?
Exactly, it’s exactly like human farming; you just get a refugee, no-one knows who they are and then make money from their body parts. The lady showed me a picture of her husband’s corpse and he was just empty, all hollow, all you see is a slit down his front and there is nothing in there. Everyone in the hospital (where it happened) just told her he had a heart attack and there was no investigation. Whilst we were filming in Athens, we went into a refugee camp that was controlled by a terrorist group, and it sounds like I am making this up but I’m not. Yet at times it felt very surreal. We were accused of being spies for the Syrian regime at one point. And this is all in downtown Athens! One minute we were talking to one guy about how he keeps trying to get himself recruited to go back to Syria to fight, and then a BMW goes past with some pretty girls all dressed up on a Saturday night out. As you can expect we have had a lot of interest in this film documentary and it is being aired at a very major film festival in the next few months but I can’t say which one it is yet publicly.
These are two very diverse projects with the first one being a comedy project, and this other one completely serious. How did you balance that?
I guess it was just finding the happy median as there were moments of absolute heartbreak in that film and even now, when I was doing the sound edits and there was one scene where it involved child soldiers and recruiters, hearing it with proper sound hit me again emotionally, and I had to take a break. There are really tragic moments but there are also some hilarious moments because even though most of these people have been let down once they have crossed the border, they have not lost their sense of humour.
In one scene I had some of the Syrians read out offensive tweets that people had put on Twitter about Syrian refugees and the put-downs they had in response were so hilarious. The amazing thing is how ready to laugh they are themselves. A bit of empathy and also to try and cheer somebody up can be as powerful as the bog-standard concerned reporter expression that is often on TV, almost by default. Obviously, you have to be appropriate to the subject matter but you can’t get too involved. You can’t laugh and you can’t cry, you have to be so disciplined in your range of emotional responses. But when I am producing it myself, and well as being the presenter and writer, no-one is going to tell me what not to do, or what to do, so I can go in being me. That could mean at times I am balling my eyes out midway through an interview, whilst sometimes I am laughing my head off just connecting with people, rather than thinking ‘ok, you are a refugee, so I need to keep you at arm’s length’. There are happy moments and there are sad moments. There is the whole range because that is what it is like as human beings.
Omar Hamdi: British Dream is on Amazon Prime now.
He will be previewing an Edinburgh festival show at the Sherman Theatre, Thu 26 Jul. Tickets: £6 (£10 when combined with Stuart Goldsmith tickets for the same day). Info: www.shermantheatre.co.uk