Leila Navabi makes BBC documentary Funny, Gay & Welsh – British Comedy Guide
- Leila Navabi has made the BBC Wales documentary Funny, Gay & Welsh, about her struggle to come out as gay while growing up in Cardiff
- The comic has now returned to the city and the film follows her as she prepares to perform her biggest ever gig
- Navabi’s Radio 4 comedy drama, I’ve Been So Touched, a loosely autobiographical story about sexual assault, aired earlier this week
Leila Navabi
Stand-up Leila Navabi has made a BBC documentary about her struggle to come out as gay while growing up in Cardiff and returning to the city as a queer comic to perform her biggest ever gig, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.
Leila Navabi: Funny, Gay & Welsh will air on BBC One Wales on October 11th.
In the 30-minute film, Navabi recounts how as a closeted teenager she “hated” living in the Welsh capital and thought about killing herself rather than have people know she was a lesbian.
“I couldn’t face the judgement and thought that that would be less painful for everyone” she reflects in the documentary.
At 16, she was outed by an ex-boyfriend, recalling how she “felt like an atomic bomb had been let off and I just wanted to get out of the firing line”. Soon after, she moved to London and began going to see stand-up at Camden Comedy Club, before taking to the stage herself.
Now, feeling homesick for family, she’s returned to Cardiff. In the course of the film, she visits her old school, finds a thriving queer scene in the city and prepares to perform a work-in-progress performance of her 2023 Edinburgh Fringe debut, Composition.
Stand-up and songs from “a small, brown lesbian rambling about my trauma”, she nervously prepares for the show at the Glee venue in Cardiff, Wales’ biggest comedy club.
Funny, Gay & Welsh is produced and directed by Rosemary Baker (Gareth Gwynn Declares Independence From Wales) for Tuesday’s Child (Guessable?, Ghost Bus Tours) and was commissioned for BBC Wales by Sorelle Neil.
Vandullz. Image shows left to right: Efa (Bethan W Jones), Nadz (Leila Navabi), TJ (Dom Francis)
Navabi co-wrote and starred in the short-form BBC One Wales sitcom Vandullz last year, about an indie band, in which her character Nadz tries to keep her sexuality from her bandmates.
She also wrote the comedy drama I’ve Been So Touched, which aired on Radio 4 on Thursday, about a comedian who is sexually assaulted at a television recording and relies on her friends to help her cope, echoing her own experience.
Further credits include writing for the BBC’s upcoming reboot of Jack Whitehall‘s Bad Education and Spencer Jones‘ ITV comedy Deep Fake Neighbour Wars, as well as presenting the CBBC science series Don’t Blame Me, Blame My Brain with fellow stand-up Ken Cheng.
“I am quite tired of being told (almost exclusively by heterosexual people, absolutely exclusively by white people) that ‘no one cares anymore’ about the large chunk of my identity that I spent a lot of my life desperately, ceaselessly ashamed of” Navabi wrote last year in an opinion piece for BBC Wales around the broadcast of Vandullz. “Not to say that the billowing smoke of self-disgust doesn’t plague me still, on occasion. It does.”
“Coming out is never one singular event” she added. “The first time you utter those words it can feel momentous / nauseating / exciting / alien, but you quickly realise you can’t send a mass text letting everyone you have ever and will ever meet know that you’re actually a massive fruit. I’ve always promised myself that if I’m lucky enough to tell my own stories on screen, I will honour the reality of this situation. And guess what? It’s happened.
Leila Navabi
“What I was keen to spotlight was the interim period between coming out to yourself and before sharing with anyone else. There’s something sacred about that time. The beauty of internal acceptance, uncorrupted by external perception.
“Pride and shame are like love and hatred. We are inexplicably capable of feeling both at once. The level of shame thrust upon you is always in direct correlation to the pride you had in sharing your truth in the first place. And that’s why I agreed to write this article. Even though it cringes me to my core.”
Ahead of her Fringe run next year, Navabi highlighted the lack of diversity at this year’s festival, tweeting last month that “being a brown comedian in Edinburgh is like being a hockey player in a swimming competition.”
The comment seemed to result in Sky Studios producer Adnan Ahmed, chair of this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards, blocking her on Twitter.
Last week Navabi followed up by tweeting: “I wasn’t nasty or contrarian or brash or cruel. I was sad because it seemed like the only way to be celebrated in the mainstream comedy industry was to be white. Sadder now.
“I know it’s a hard time to call this stuff out. I don’t blame anyone who can’t bring themselves to speak up because they’re afraid of losing the already scarce work opportunities. But do check in on your POC friends. We don’t have a voice to use even if we wanted to, it seems.”