Being a stand-up comedian must be one of the most daunting careers anyone could choose to pursue. Until you are well-known and loved you’re constantly walking a fine line between rapturous reception and sheer opprobrium. Audiences are legendarily fickle things, and while having a hundred people in tears of laughter at your witticisms is surely a great feeling, dying on stage (metaphorically) must be one of the worst – a feeling I once encountered myself when embarking on an ill-advised two minute improvisation while acting as a policeman in our school performance of My Fair Lady in 1989.

Nonetheless, if you’re good enough, a living not only as a stand-up beckons but you might even get a telly show with your name on it – hence the arrival on our screens of The Omid Djalili Show starting 21 August on YLE1 at 22:15. If you missed his one performance in Finland in February last year, allow me to fill you in. Djalili is the UK’s ‘best-loved British-Iranian comedian’, a title he bears pretty much by default rather than anything else. You may well have seen him playing a generic Middle-Eastern character in a number of films including The Mummy, The World Is Not Enough, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Sex and the City 2 (!). His comedy is a mixture of jokes about the Middle East, Muslims, Jews, racism, funny accents, belly-dancing, the war on terror, and kebabs.

Despite the potentially exciting and offensive angle of these subjects, especially kebabs, don’t expect too many fireworks. Unless you’re Bill Hicks, one truism of comedic fame is that the wider your audience, the less willing you become to rub people up the wrong way, more’s the pity. It seems to me that the more you’re concerned about not alienating people or upsetting audience members under the age of 12, the more chance your act will become, well, a bit boring.

Rather like his stand-up, Djalili’s TV show shows flashes of quite incisive humour combined with material guaranteed to raise nary a smirk. The series itself lasted for two runs in the UK before being axed by the BBC. Combining stand-up skits with short sketches, the main problem is that Omid just doesn’t have enough interesting material to keep us going. An entertaining sketch with Djalili playing ME TV anchor Gordon Farahani (“Coming up later – Uranium, or no Uranium!”) may be accompanied by an unfunny segment involving the fact that ‘Croat’ is pronounced Cro-at, whereas ‘moat’ isn’t pronounced mo-at. Often it’s just a bit meh really. Mind you, season 2 is definitely funnier than the first – YouTube ‘Bin Ladens Cousin’ for proof – so here’s hoping YLE bought both of them.

Incidentally, YLE Teema is continuing its broadcasts of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, weekly on Thursday nights until the beginning of October. Always interesting and occasionally downright hilarious this series comes highly recommended. Unfortunately probably the funniest episode has already been broadcast – the one about UFOs – but there are plenty more magic moments to keep you busy through the autumn. It’s worth checking out YLE’s excellent Areena website for some past episodes of this and other documentaries shown on the channel – the vast majority of which are superior to those terrible shock-docs on the commercial channels.

Nick Barlow