“What?” she reenacts for me, voice harsh with impatience. “It’s early.”
Don’t be fooled by the deadpan. Once she’s done with the act, she quickly returns to laughing, beaming, “it’s brilliant, such beautiful news.”
The six-part series is set in East London and follows a pair of Community Support Officers desperate to clean up the community, but unwittingly end up in the dangerous world of deep cover infiltration.
Dom (Gbemisola Ikumelo) and Kay (Hammed Animashaun) are eager to help and make a difference so join the Met Police force, but find themselves out of their depth and in a fiasco more dangerous than either could anticipate.
Dom is feisty and always ready to stand up for himself and Kay comes across as naïve but proves herself to be more than capable.
The six-part series will follow Dom and Kay, two new officers who join the Met Police with the aim of clearing up their community. When the pair join a powerful criminal enterprise and are suddenly thrust into the dark underworld of deep cover infiltration, the operation soon turns into a fiasco.
Gbemisola Ikumelo thanks the cast of Famalam and to BBC Studios for allowing space to make an audacious, loud and unapologetically black driven show as she accepts the Comedy Performance - Female award at the RTS Programme Awards 2021, in partnership with Audio Network.
When Famalam came to our screens in 2018, British television was ready and waiting for a high-profile comedic exploration of the contemporary black British experience. It tapped the same vein as Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and the 1990s ensemble show The Real McCoy – and another hit sketch show was long overdue.
The series, written by and starring Gbemisola Ikumelo (Famalam), is a flat-share comedy centred around Remi, a normal single woman in her twenties who is battling anxiety in the form of her two alter egos, Boss Bitch Remi and Dark Remi.
With one voice telling her to seize the day and the other urging her to curl up in bed all day, Remi attempts to navigate everyday life with the conflict of her inner voices pulling her in opposite directions.
