Brexit, to paraphrase James Joyce, is a nightmare from which many of us are still trying to awake. While young peopleoverwhelmingly voted remain, they woke up to find themselves in Brexit Britain. Racist incidents are on the up, the pound’sgone down, and everyone in charge appears to be, to put it mildly, behaving like a photographic negative of Rudyard Kipling’s If. And it became clear to me that we’ve become an international laughing stock when David Simon, creator of The Wire,approvingly tweeted of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson’s machinations: “Shit is West Baltimore, but with Pimm’s, tweed and crustless cucumber sandwiches. F’real, Brits are just gangster.” Laugh it up, Chuckles. You’ll be sorry whenTrump gets his hands on the nuclear codes (though with any luck histiny fingers won’t be able to press the buttons).

On to this turbid ocean of tears comes the launch ofOutsiders, a pilot sitcom I helped make as part of Comedy Blaps, Channel 4’s scheme for new comedy talent. The show was originally conceived as an improvised flatshare comedy, cast with up-and-coming stand-up comedians rather than actors, all from foreign shores: last year’s Edinburgh best newcomer winnerSofie Hagen from Denmark,Mae Martin from Canada,Pierre Novellie from South Africa by way of the Isle of Man,Yasmine Akram from Ireland andJamali Maddix from, er, Dagenham. (You can catch them doing their stand-up thing this month at theEdinburgh fringe.)

It was inspired by our experiences of leaving home and moving to the fringes of cities, in the kind of flatshares that feature in Vice’s series “London rental opportunity of the week”. Places where the rent is extortionate but there’s no communal space because the living room is being used as an extra bedroom, someone else is sleeping on a sofa-bed in the kitchen, and all you have in common with your flatmates is that you answered the same ad on Gumtree. For millennials, on track to be the first generation toearn less than their parents, and the least likely to own a property since the second world war, this kind of situation is all too familiar.

But when we shot it back in March, no one seriously thoughtBrexit was going to happen. Since then, a sitcom about a multicultural bunch of young people thrown together in a London flat has become worryingly topical. The show opens with Min filling in a UK visa application, and there’s a constant undercurrent of paranoia about being kicked out of the country.

We took a lot of the script directly from lines the actors came out with in improv. When the bored flatmates play a guessing game about Jamali’s ethnicity, he storms out of the flat saying: “I’m the only one with a British passport, and you have the audacity to ask me where I’m from? I’m from London. This is my city. These are my people.” Only to get “Oi, Bin Laden!” shouted at him as soon as he walks out the door. That’s lifted directly from one of Jamali’s stand-up routines, but in a Britain whereracists have been emboldened by the Brexit vote, it feels very much of the moment.

What are all the immigrants living in the UK supposed to make of the groundswell of support to “take our country back”? Writer Andrew Ellard used to come into meetings groaning about the leave campaign posters. “The ugliness of that poster – how much it looks like a command to foreigners, eerily like“No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”. If we were making the show now, we’d have one on the wall, covered in the flatmates’ obscene graffiti.”

The opposite of that is the mayor of London’sLondon Is Open campaign video, a gorgeous feat of editing I find hypnotically soothing. Like the leave poster, it has a double meaning: open for business, and open to everyone. It’s just a shame it’s now necessary to launch such a campaign to publicly state that.

More by luck than by design, Outsiders speaks to the weird sense of isolation that young remainers are feeling, adrift in a backwards, xenophobic world. We even had “Remains” on the list as a possible title, but struck it off as being a bit harsh. How innocent we were.

Bremain calm. Maybe this could be the post-Brexit sitcom to give us the laugh we all need.

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