University News Last updated 22 July 2016
Actor and broadcaster Adil Ray is to be awarded an honorary degree from Birmingham City University.
Birmingham-born Adil is best known as the star and creator of the award-winning hit BBC One sitcom ‘Citizen Khan’. The show, set in the Birmingham suburb of Sparkhill, regularly attracts five million viewers in the UK and is broadcast worldwide.
Adil has appeared and presented on all the four main BBC television channels – as well as all the corporation’s major radio networks – including the acclaimed BBC Three documentary ‘Exposed: Groomed for Sex’, which saw him win a Royal Television Society Award for Best Current Affairs. Adil is a guest presenter on ‘The One Show’ and regularly appears on TV programmes such as ‘Have I Got News For You’, ‘Room 101’ and ‘Pointless’.
Adil will receive his Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University on Monday 25 July in a ceremony with students graduating from the Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham School of Media and the Schools of Art and English.
Adil was the first British Asian to host a daily radio show on mainstream, commercial radio before joining the BBC Asian Network in 2000. After hosting the Breakfast Show, Adil left to develop his comedy projects. In that time he also joined news broadcaster BBC Radio 5 live.
His role as a news broadcaster has also been demonstrated through his coverage of the UK summer riots in 2011, the phone hacking scandal and covering the night the UK went to war in Libya.
Earlier this year, he was appointed an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours for his services to broadcasting.
Adil offered some words of advice to the Birmingham City University graduands he will address on Monday:
Series five of ‘Citizen Khan’ returns to TV screens later this year.
Image credit: Andy Fallon