Matcha v Macho: Omar Badawy’s Guided Detour

★★★★

13 September 2025 is where the narrative arc of Omar Badawy’s Guided Detour begins.

A writer on Saturday Night Live UK, Badawy is not a confrontational person. He really doesn’t want to be involved. For a man who goes by ‘PoshArab’ online, finding himself swept into a crowd of over 100,000 far-right protesters is exactly the type of confrontation he would rather avoid.

So what does a British-Egyptian making his way across London to a costume party do when he finds himself in a Tommy Robinson ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march? Badawy might as well be Dorothy, tornadoed out of Kansas and onto a yellow brick road signposted wrong. Except here, Elon Musk awaits at the end, beamed into the march via video call. And, to make matters worse, Badawy discovers his girlfriend’s visa is expiring, supplementing the threat of the far right with the arguably worse prospect of a too-soon marriage.

Luckily, Badawy has a talisman at this march—essentially a suit of armour protecting him—because he is dressed as a Viking. In this century, at least, he is not the enemy.

Though take us back to the early 800s AD, when Viking raids in Anglo-Saxon Britain may still have been a sensitive subject, and this guise would not have been quite so safe. Thankfully for Badawy, generational trauma does not appear to have laid claim to his appearance.

Back in the present day, however, the hilarious push and pull between being raised in Cambridge and finding himself caught up in the fervour of the march is laid bare. Still disappointed in himself when rehashing the story, Badawy recalls attempting to sound tough after police approached his group with reports of looting. His intended “Fuck the police!” instead emerges as “Preposterous!”

And this nervous reluctance to get involved persists, no matter what ‘side’ Badawy finds himself on. When a counter-protester reassures him that, if things kick off, “we’ve got this”, Badawy’s response is essentially: no, we have not. If they’re “macho”, we’re “matcha”, and any they/thems could very quickly become they/weres.

It is in these rapid diversions that Badawy is at his best. His comedy is quick—occasionally too quick—not merely in the frequency of its punchlines, but in the speed at which he moves between scenes and seemingly sidetracked thoughts. There’s an infectious energy to his storytelling; every tangent seems capable of spawning another, yet the central narrative never disappears beneath them. 

Badawy skilfully guides his audience from scene to scene, tangent to tangent, always finding his way back to the main event. It’s comedy that manages to be at once offensive to absolutely everyone and no one at all.

Truly, this detour is guided.

Eilidh Paterson