Hot Shots 2024: Ambreen Razia

Expectation executives Morwenna Gordon and Nerys Evans first set their sights on working with Ambreen Razia when they saw her play, The Diary Of A Hounslow Girl, in 2016.

Subsequently adapted as BBC3 Comedy Slice Hounslow Diaries, the one-woman play announced Ambreen as a writer of resilient and uncompromising women. Her raw, inclusive, funny stories are rooted in her Muslim identity and an upbringing shaped by generations of strong women in a single-parent family.

In her following plays POT and Favour, Razia vividly and viscerally took on girl gangs and female Muslim prisoners – and her first authored TV series looks similarly uncompromising.

She is now developing Wasted, a comedy-drama about a South Asian woman and her daughter that tackles addiction and post-partum depression, with Expectation. Razia has said she wants to “lift the lid on the Muslim women that society refuses to acknowledge, and uncover a very personal experience that we have yet to see on screen”. The show is the first fruit of her two-year development deal with the indie.

“Ambreen’s an immense talent, with a knack for creating complex, funny characters who feel utterly grounded, while being unlike anything else we’ve seen on TV,” Gordon and Evans say in their nomination.

Razia has already graced the writers’ rooms of two of the most distinctive comedies around – Disney+ superhero series Extraordinary and Channel 4’s Muslim punk band sitcom We Are Lady Parts – and is part of the team behind a new BBC elevated crime series.

Her chameleonic talent has also been on display in on-screen roles, including Ted Lasso for Apple TV+, Black Mirror for Netflix, BBC3’s Starstruck and C4’s The Curse.