Shai Hussain

Shai is the creator of the critically-acclaimed comedy webseries Three Shades of Brown. The pilot episode premiered at the New York Indian Film Festival and ratcheted up thousands of views before being selected as the sole TV show representing British filmmaking at Vermont’s Independent TV Festival. Arts Council UK recently awarded Shai a Digital Commission to produce his short film The Waving Man.

His Afternoon Play Til Jihad Do Us Part (with Goodness Gracious Me’s Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia) was broadcast to critical acclaim on BBC Radio 4. This followed the project making finalist as a feature script on The Big Pitch competition, where it attached Gordon Anderson (The Inbetweeners) as director and narrowly missed out on winning the £250k production prize.

He wrote for BBC Asian Network's daily radio soap Silver Street, followed by his play Reality Check and the co-written collection Resolutions.

Shai showcased a 30-minute sample of his stageplay Settlingat the West End,developed by Criterion Theatre. It continues to be supported with a feature-length showcase due in 2025.

He devised two short monologues for Tamasha Theatre that were published for Oberon’s Hear Me Now anthology book. His speech on UK screen diversity at the House of Lords was also published for The Asian Writer. Following his script Brown Alert making the shortlist for the BBC Fast Cuts competition, Shai was selected for the BBC Comedy Room and shortly afterwards joined the BBC New Talent Hotlist.

His sitcom Generasians was optioned to NBC Universal and he wrote episodes for the daily soap opera Cloud 9 on Channel Zing. He was also commissioned to write Hey Krish for The VIP Studio, a Peppa Pig-like show for preschoolers based on baby versions of Hindu gods, and adapted the bestselling novel Orphan Of Islam into a film treatment.

He has just finished a novelisation of his film script Company Sahib (it recently received an evaluation score of 8.1 on The Black List, which only 5% of submissions manage), and is now developing a screenplay based on The Battle of Bamber Bridge.

Shai is represented by SWA.