Comedian Shazia Mirza's defiant clapback to Celebrity SAS crew who told her to leave

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Shazia Mirza says she refused to hand over her armband because she felt she could go further - and that insults didn't come close to what her own parents used to say to her

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Shazia Mirza insists Billy Billingham's put downs on Celebrity SAS didn't affect her

Shazia Mirza says Celebrity SAS is not as tough as teaching kids â€" or doing stand-up comedy.

And she reckons her parents were harsher than the show’s tough guys Billy Billingham and Chris Oliver. The comic, 46, was talking on our podcast Invite Only after getting the bullet last week for lagging behind on an assault course. At first she refused an order to hand over her armband â€" and she still insists she was strong enough to have reached tomorrow’s final.

“I felt like at that point where I left there was a lot of people still left and they were trying to get rid of people,” she said. “Chris said, ‘Gimme your armband’. I refused to do it because I knew I could go further from my past experiences doing Bear Grylls and Celebs in Solitary. I just felt, ‘I’m not dead yet. You know, my legs are still moving’.”

Shazia Mirza left Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins on Tuesday's show on the orders of the directing staff (

Image:

Channel 4)

While admitting it wasn’t enjoyable, the former science teacher says the experience did not compare to dealing with unruly teens in a classroom or getting heckled on stage. Shazia, who once taught rapper Dizzee Rascal, said: “I took the first (teaching) job that I got, which was in the East End of London. It was the hardest place for a newly qualified teacher to go. It was worse than SAS. I was 22 and trying to handle 16-year-olds who come to school with knives and don’t want to learn.”

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Brummie Shazia says dressing-downs from the SAS crew were nothing compared to the blunt appraisals from her parents. During her last exercise, on the show, instructors shouted at her to “keep up” and “stop f****** loafing”. Shazia recalled: “On SAS, Billy was trying to insult me and bring me down. I thought, ‘You’ve never had Asian parents, they did this all the time’. Tell you how fat you are, how ugly you are, how you’re never gonna get married, and what a failure you are. I’ve heard all of this. So Billy saying to me I’m not funny. I was like, ‘Yeah, so what?’”

While there was no love lost between Shazia and the directing staff, she says she has made friends with fellow celebs, including Rachel Johnson, 59, and Pete Wicks, 36. “I’ve done shows before where people haven’t been that nice or people have been two-faced,” she said. “This was not like that at all. I think it’s because it was so awful that you had no choice but to like each other. We’ve got our WhatsApp group. Rachel had a party at her house when we came out.”

Shazia talks to the Mirror's Invite Only podcast about her trailblazing comedy career as the first Asian Muslim female comic (

Image:

Tim Merry/Staff Photographer)

Shazia says she’s been loving watching Pete and pals Chris McCausland, 47, and Wynne Evans, 52, on Strictly Come Dancing. “Chris is amazing,” she beamed. “He’s a great comedian. I didn’t know he could dance. Also Wynne is a friend of mine. We did Celebrity MasterChef together. And he’s ­actually really funny. And Pete, he was so nice, kind, supportive. We had a really good time. They’re all doing great. They’re all fab.”

She said TV doctor Punam Krishan’s Bollywood performance on Strictly really resonated with her. “Punam said, ‘I’m going back to my 14-year-old self’ and how nobody looked like her on TV,” she said. “I related to all of that because that’s every immigrant child’s experience. Not seeing you represented and thinking, ‘I can’t be on that or I can’t do that’. I was told to stay in my lane and do what we do, which is medicine, law, you know, teaching, which is what I did.”

Shazia says she idolised newsreader Trevor McDonald, 85, as a kid. “When I was growing up, nobody on TV looked like me,” she explained. “So my dad always used to say to me ‘Hurry up, hurry up, get downstairs. Trevor is on the TV’. Because Trevor McDonald was the closest thing to an Asian woman at the time. So I grew up thinking I was a black man. I had pictures of Trevor McDonald on my wall because I thought, ‘Well, this is what I need to be’.”

When Shazia started as a stand-up about 20 years ago she was the only Asian woman on the scene. Now she is one of a six-strong troupe of Muslim female stand-ups called Comedy Queens who are about to tour Sweden and South Africa. “There was a lot of pressure to get good very quickly because there were few women, there were no Asian women,” she said. “I was the first Muslim woman. It was hard. Audiences were scared to laugh at certain things because we’d been the butt of the joke for so long.”

The final two episodes of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins are tonight and tomorrow, Channel 4, 9pm

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