THE STREET WHEREIGREWUP

KELSO PLACE, KENSINGTON, LONDON

Omid Djalili, 56, award-winning comedian and actor...

Iwasraisedin ablockofflats in a small culde-sac called Kelso Place in Kensington, west London. It was a very middle-class area. The other kids in our street were the children of foreign diplomats from the neighbouring embassies and I’m ashamed to say I made fun of their poor English. When one of them said, ‘Don’t make laugh of him,’ meaning don’t make fun of my brother, we all fell about giggling.

In contrast, down the street a little pathway took you to SW7, where the hard kids lived. One of them terrorised me, and I once hit him with a water balloon which exploded on his head. He never forgave me. When I was 19, I bumped into him on Kensington High Street and he shoved me. He’d held a grudge since the 1970s.

I was an extrovert child and organised all the street games – from cricket and football to an extreme version of hide and seek which covered such a wide area that a single game would last up to three hours.

My parents, who’d come here from Iran in 1958, let me play outside for hours because they trusted the English. They’d started a new life because my mother, a dress designer for the famous Iranian singer Googoosh, had this romantic idea of making dresses in London. They’d intended to go back to Iran, which horrified me and my older brother and sister, but they stayed on, and there was no question of returning after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 because my family were Baha’is, a persecuted minority who were rounded up and killed.

My father had been a celebrated news photographer in Iran, but made a new career in England taking in sick Iranian lodgers who’d travelled to the UK to get medical assistance. I had to give up my bedroom to the guests and slept on the couch in the living room. My parents just put a blanket over me while they played backgammon until 1am. I became fluent in Persian because I hung around with the

adults, and by the age of eight nobody could beat me at backgammon.

Not having a bedroom meant I had nowhere to be, so I became pretty much a street urchin. My parents were so busy looking after the guests that they took their eye off the ball. I wore the same jumper and jeans every day for a year. A teacher sent a note saying, ‘Your child is very smelly. Do you need some help with hygiene?’ My mother was mortified and said, ‘I’m a seamstress. This won’t happen again.’ Sure enough, the next day I went to school in a suit, so everybody made fun of me because I’d gone from being the worst-dressed, smelliest boy to the most overdressed and sweetest-smelling. I’d like to stress that my parents loved me. But they’d look out the window, see me playing and assume I wouldn’t come to harm. When you’ve been raised on a couch and had no privacy, you long for solitude. So, when I got a place at the University of Ulster, I rented a seaside cottage, bunked off my lectures, and went for long walks instead. Even now, when an audience gives me a standing ovation I tell them I only do this job to heal the wounds of my childhood because I need the laughter of strangers to validate my existence. That makes them clap even more.

Omid Djalili is touring the UK in The Good Times Tour until December and performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August. For tickets and more information visit omidnoagenda.com

On a remote beach, newly hatched turtles are scrambling through the sand for the safety of the water. But they’ve been spotted by a predator. Stalking on its long hind legs, the hunter approaches with curiosity. Its talons are like machete blades, its teeth like daggers. But it’s a juvenile itself and has never seen a turtle.

The baby Tyrannosaurus rex places one tentative claw on a turtle and watches in bemusement as it wriggles free. Alarmed, Tiny Rex runs up the beach, back to the safety of its parent – a fully grown male Tyrannosaurus, 40ft long and weighing ten tons. The father nuzzles his infant, rubbing the sides of his jaw along the baby’s furry flanks, and then gives him a nudge, urging his offspring to try again, as if to say, ‘Go on, it won’t bite.’

As touching as it is astounding to see, the scene is made perfect by the voiceover – from the doyen of wildlife narrators, Sir David Attenborough. ‘He’s got the killer instinct,’ chuckles the great broadcaster, as he watches the dinosaur’s clumsy attempts to catch a snack, ‘but his problem is inexperience. This could take some time.’ After recording his commentary, Sir David takes off his headphones and sits back in amazement. ‘It was like I was watching them through a pair of binoculars,’ he marvels.

The clip is part of Prehistoric Planet, the most ambitious series about dinosaurs ever made. A collaboration between BBC Studios Natural History Unit and a team of special effects wizards headed by Emmy-winning producer Jon Favreau, who’s directed Marvel films (and appeared in them as Iron Man’s friend Happy Hogan), it re-creates dinosaurs from 66 million years ago, shortly before a meteorite hit the Earth and wiped them out.

The accuracy of the scientific detail and the high-definition images make this five-part series coming to Apple TV+ a giant leap forwards from CGI depictions such as Walking With Dinosaurs in 1999 and Jurassic Park in 1993. ‘When people first discovered dinosaur fossils, they thought they were dragons,’ says series producer Mike Gunton, who was behind hit series such as Planet Earth II and Dynasties. ‘Our aim was to bring what we now know to the screen. This is more than a TV show. It’s a piece of seminal science.

‘We’ve drawn together threads of science, like Sherlock Holmes pulling together the clues in a mystery. This is not a jaws-and-claws show.

It’s about the world that existed – Planet Earth, 66 million years ago.’

Aimed at a broad family audience, the series features numerous prehistoric animals whose existence was only recently discovered, alongside some of their extraordinary behaviour.

Take, for instance, the T-rex. The juvenile on the beach is almost unrecognisable from the plastic toys of previous generations. It has a pelt, for a start. Scientists are still debating whether the follicles on its body were fur or feathers, or something between. It appears they shed this coat as they approached maturity.

‘A teacher sent a note to my parents saying, “Your child is very smelly”’

As babies, though, they may have had a tigerish black-and-ginger hide which gave them camouflage to hide them from predators. One of the show’s many shocks is that different species of Tyrannosaurus existed during the Cretaceous period, the last of the dinosaur eras. Fossils of Qianzhousaurus were identified in southern China nearly ten years ago. Referred to as ‘Pinocchio Rex’ due to their long snouts, they were swift runners. Another relative, Nanuqsaurus, lived in the polar north, probably with a thick coat of feathers to insulate it from the cold. Fossil records also reveal that some Tyrannosaurs were confident swimmers, using their tails and hind legs to propel themselves through water. Perhaps the most amazing sequences