NO ONE really knows what the Queen’s favourite TV programme is – but recently New Statesman columnist and BBC Radio 2 and sports broadcaster Phil Jones spilled the beans.
In late February 2022, just as he was about to hang up his BBC microphone, he decided to recount a conversation he had with the monarch back in 2001. He had been told that journalists could not under any circumstances except on their deathbed tell others about the conversations they had with the Queen.
Eschewing that principle because of his impending retirement from the BBC, Jones said that he was struggling of things to say and finally blurted to the Majesty: “What’s your favourite programme?
She answered: “The Kumars at No. 42”.
Jones said she was very familiar with the characters, especially Ummi the grandmother – played by Meera Syal and even recounted some of her one-liners.
Bhaskar reacting to Jones’ revelation said in a tweet: “I mean I couldn’t possibly comment.”
The BBC programme was essentially a comedy chat show which featured an Asian family living at No. 42 (Wembley in London) with Sanjeev Bhaskar, playing an alter ego character, also called Sanjeev. It ran between 2001-2005 and was briefly revived by Sky and broadcast as The Kumars at No. 42B.
Bhaskar says the Queen had spoken to him before and was aware of the show and its characters – but had imagined that she had simply been well-briefed. Now what would Ummi make of those briefs?
Syal is currently involved in the filming of The Almond and The Seahorse, based on a play by Kaite O’Reilly which looks at the effect of traumatic brain injury and what it can do, to not only the sufferer but the family who has to support and help them.
The film has several Hollywood stars in it, including Rebel Wilson (Bridesmaids) and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Independence Day: Resurgence). Filming had started in April 2021 but scenes were still being shot in early 2022.
Both Syal and Bhakser are set to appear at the Park Theatre’s innovative Whodunnit Unrehearsed – which sees a murder take place and features the voices of actors Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, but with a different celebrity step into the role of an inspector without ever having seen the script. A fundraising initiative at the popular theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, it was set to close in mid-March.
Syal was also involved in another spin-off series from The Kumars at No. 42, reprising her role as the Ummi in Gossip and Goddesses with Granny Kumar early last year. Guests included broadcaster Samira Ahmed, actress Thandie Newton, scientist Maggie Ebunoluwa Aderin-Pocock, broadcaster and comedian Ayesha Hazarika, BBC presenter Anita Rani, writer and journalist Anita Anand, musician Anoushka Shankar.
More recently, Syal was the subject of this publisher and Southampton University’s inaugural fireside chat Pioneers Project, which will see the Asian Media Group – inspired by its founder and former editor-in-chief Ramniklal Solanki CBE, who died in March 2020 – team up with the university to identify 100 pioneers from the Asian community.
Speaking to Eastern Eye’s editor-at-large Barnie Choudhury, Syal said too many executives were blindly led by quotas and tick-box diversity and it wasn’t helping anyone.
“People think diversity is a headcount and you switch on your television and go ‘well, there’s one and there’s one, I mean, they’re all over the place, they’re even in adverts now for God’s sake’. But that’s actually superficial headcounts.”
She said audiences are smart but most of the industry hasn’t caught up and is still stuck in a time-warp and just not particularly bothered about diversity. Mostly, they are just paying lip service to the idea, she felt. “I feel we have so many untold stories that haven’t been told before, then I do feel the quota system comes in.
“So many times have I heard – we have something similar, which doesn’t mean we have something that is exactly the same idea as yours, it just means we have something with brown people in it, and we can’t have both things at the same time. That makes me crazy mad.”
Syal, it perhaps goes without saying, is the most prominent creative from an Asian background to have emerged in recent times. She is not only one of the most recognisable faces in the entertainment space but her talent as an actor, performer, and writer are well charted and widely celebrated, whether it be on the stage, in film – or writing novels or screen tales. She was presented with a CBE in 2015.
Her significant breakthrough was in the iconic Goodness Gracious Me (GGM) BBC sketch show. It started on radio then graduated to television and remains one of the most loved and cherished comedy sketch shows of the last century, finishing in 2001.
Syal’s destiny was, perhaps, writ large when she won an award for a student show at the Edinburgh International Festival and secured a contract with the Royal Court off the back of it.
She penned the screenplay for Bhaji on the Beach (1993) – with Gurinder Chadha who directed, and has written three novels of which two have been adapted for the screen in addition – the semi-autobiographical Anita and Me (1996) – and today you will find this on school syllabuses and Life isn’t all Ha Ha Hee (1999). Her most recent novel is The House of Hidden Mothers (2015).
Her husband Bhaskar was back on TV in the much loved and critically appraised Unforgotten, playing Detective Inspector Sunny Khan.
In February 2022, he was announced as one of the shortlisted Best Actors for his role in Unforgotten by the Broadcasting Press Guild (BPG) which means he has received critical acclaim for his acting prowess – not bad for the one-time marketing executive who started his career, doing sketches with the now famous musical artist and his close friend, Nitin Sawhney and dabbling in stand-up.
The most recent series was perhaps its most successful and explosive – the final episode saw DI Sunny Khan deliver a moving eulogy to his crime-sleuthing partner DCI Cassie Stuart, played by Nicola Walker. This series and its final episode was watched by almost 10 million viewers making it one of ITV’s biggest.
Warm and often self-deprecating, Bhaskar revealed in an interview in The Times he was in some ways living out his boyhood fantasies of hob-knobbing with successful artists.
A big fan of Monty Python, he is friends with Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones. He has also appeared in a Terry Gilliam (another of the original comedy gang) film – The Zero Theorem (2013). He also got to become friends with the 1970s 007 Roger Moore and has met three of the Beatles.
Perhaps poignantly for Bhaskar, the couple (with Syal) played parents to Himesh Patel in Richard Curtis’s summer film smash in 2019, Yesterday – in which Patel plays a musician who is the only person to know and be able to play Beatles’ tracks. Bhaskar and Sawhney were spotted by BBC producer Anil Gupta who went onto make GGM.
Bhaskar met Syal on GGM, married in 2005 and have a teenage son, Shaan. Syal also has a grown-up daughter who is a fast-rising theatre director Milli, whose father and to whom Syal was married, is award-winning journalist Shekhar Bhatia.