The actor, writer and comedian on turning his life around, fancying Cilla Black and his secret nose-picking

Born in Coventry, Guz Khan, 39, was working as a secondary school teacher when he began uploading comedy videos as the character Mobeen in 2014. The following year, he gave up teaching to pursue standup. In 2017, his show Man Like Mobeen was released by the BBC and ran for five series. He won a Royal Television Society award in 2020 and was Bafta-nominated twice. His films include Army of Thieves and The Bubble. Guz Khan’s Custom Cars starts on Quest on 19 January. He is married with five children and lives in the West Midlands.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impulsivity. We end up in strange places, like right now – I am in the Middle East.

The Scottish star used his exceptional gift for impersonations to create genre-mashing specials that were as epic as the Hollywood films they parodied. He was a perfectionist performer with huge talent

• Actor and comedian Stanley Baxter dies aged 99

The description “special” is overused in television schedules; Stanley Baxter’s programmes justify it. The comedian is one of the few stars whose reputation rests on a handful of astonishing one-offs – standalone comic extravaganzas screened in the 1970s and 1980s, first by ITV’s London Weekend Television and then the BBC.

In both cases, the networks ended their associations with Baxter not because of lack of audience interest – at their peak, the shows reached more than 20 million viewers – but due to the colossal costs demanded by the performer’s vast and perfectionist visual ambition. One of Baxter’s favourite conceits was to re-create, in witty pastiche, scenes from big-budget Hollywood movies that made it look as if his versions had also spent millions of dollars.

Baxter enjoyed a decades-spanning career on radio, TV and film, and was famous for impersonating famous people including Queen Elizabeth II

• Stanley Baxter obituary

• ‘Astonishing’: how his TV extravaganzas reached 20m

The actor and comedian Stanley Baxter has died at the age of 99.

Born in Glasgow in 1926, Baxter was best known for helming TV sketch series including The Stanley Baxter Show and The Stanley Baxter Picture Show.

Trump and Vance head to South Park in Christmas gear for a big showdown – only for Jesus to show up. At one point, you can almost feel Trey Parker and Matt Stone taking a stand against the US government

Coming off its most controversial and highest rated season in years, South Park had high expectations to meet with its season finale. Given how infamously down-to-the-wire its production schedule is – showrunners Matt Stone and Trey Parker often don’t start writing scripts until the week they’re set to air, working up to the 11th hour to turn in a completed episode (a method that caused them to miss a deadline earlier this year) – there was some question as to whether they would be able to tie everything up at all, let alone in a satisfying manner.

Most viewers were probably anticipating a giant, apocalyptic climax to the various long-running storylines – chief among them Donald Trump’s attempts to kill his and his lover Satan’s soon-to-be-born spawn. Instead, Stone and Parker swerved expectations, delivering an introspective and ultimately melancholy climax, one that managed to balance hope and despair in equal measure, alongside the outrageous shock humour for which they’re famous.

Howlingly funny comedy, jaw-dropping documentaries and astonishing drama … it’s been another fantastic year of TV. Our countdown of the very best kicks off here
• More on the best culture of 2025

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Hollywood is still trying to court younger audiences but this year’s crop of new comedies, from Adults to I Love LA, have yet to prove essential

This year, despite not particularly liking the show nor wanting to, I have thought a lot about the opening scene to Adults. The FX half-hour comedy about a group of recent college graduates in New York begins, naturally, on the subway; what seems like an over-studied portrait of early adulthood intimacy – tangled limbs, in-group references, aggressively relaxed banter – quickly devolves into a standoff between a creepy subway masturbator and the group’s instigator, Issa (Amita Rao), trying to out-masturbate him to make a wildly off point about feminism. “Is this the world you want?!?” she shouts at him, hand vigorously in pants.

The moment is intentionally off-putting, perhaps too much so – I’m as ripe as anyone for surprise, but found the try-hardness of this shock memorably irksome. Yet it’s also unintentionally revealing: this, it implicitly screams, is a show to get young people’s attention. A similar anxiety courses through the opening of I Love LA, HBO’s west-coast rejoinder to Adults that is similarly pitched as a zeitgeist-y take on the thrilling chaos of young adulthood. We meet Maia, played by creator and co-writer Rachel Sennott, mid-sex with her boyfriend, heedlessly determined to come before going to work, even if it means ignoring an earthquake.