Speaking to a Guardian journalist ain’t a good look for me in the hood.” At Ali’s request, we are meeting in an independent chicken shop in Staines because – due to some sort of mix-up – he thought the one interview he had agreed to for his new film was Chicken Shop Date, which was “90% likely to lead to boning”. He follows this with an entirely unprintable reminiscence about the first time he and “me Julie” had sex in the disabled toilets of Egham KFC. Now that we have established I am not in fact Amelia Dimoldenberg – and that any boning today will be strictly chicken-related – Ali changes tack.
Whenever anyone comes near our table, he loudly explains, to my embarrassment, that we are actually conducting a major drug deal. Having seemingly worked his way through the entire menu, he starts asking what else he would need to buy to get the bill up to £500, after discovering that the Guardian is footing it. It is, in other words, reassuringly easy to tell that not everything about Ali G has changed, even though a lot has happened in the “20 decades” (he means 24 years) since he was last on the big screen in Ali G Indahouse.
In that time, the UK has had nine prime ministers, survived a global pandemic and seen the rise of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Or, as Ali puts it rather more succinctly in the trailer: “The world went to crap: there was Covid, wars and Ed Sheeran”. Now he’s back in Ali G: Who Iz I? – and, inevitably, not everybody is delighted.
The trailer alone has prompted accusations that the fake dreadlocks, Rastafarian imagery and faux-Jamaican persona now look less like satire and more like an outdated racial caricature. Which is how, 24 years after Ali G first took his home town of Staines global, I find myself sitting opposite him in his old manor, trying to work out whether the UK is ready to show him some respect again. Parked outside is the same yellow Renault 5 I remember from Indahouse, now with a homemade Uber sign stuck in the windscreen.
Around his neck hangs a diamond teddy bear clutching two sacks of money. It “used to be part of the crown jewels and was worn by the queen, RIP. A bloke who worked as a dog washer at Windsor palace nicked it and then came into the Crooked Billet pub in Iver Heath, where me bought it off him for 20K when me was rich,” he claims.
More bafflingly, he is wearing four watches. So how should I address you – Ali, Ali G or Mr G? Me iz known by me mates as “De G”, “G-Dog” and “De Ali-torney G-eneral” … and by Staines Benefits Office as Richard Watkins, Kelvin Matthews and Priyanka Patel.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
