Omid Djalili: Making light of the chaos

From his madcap childhood to college in the North, Omid Djalili has plenty life experiences to mine for comedy, says Richard Fitzpatrick

COMEDIAN Omid Djalili looks back at his unusual upbringing, which included sleeping on a couch for the first 14 years of his life, with equanimity. He was raised in an open house. The madcap circumstances are detailed in his autobiography, Hopeful. They shaped his irreverent, freewheeling comedy style and his non-judgemental disposition.

Djalili was born in Kensington, London, in 1965, the youngest of three children. His Bahaist parents had left Iran several years before to escape religious persecution in the Islamic Revolution. In London, they rented space in their apartment, which was near the Iranian Embassy, to immigrant lodgers.