HIS biography Straight Outta Crawley may have the strapline ‘Memoirs of a distinctly average human being’, but the Sri Lankan comedian has already made a huge mark on the British entertainment scene and is also beginning to produce material now.
The i Paper declared that he’s ‘overtaken Jack Whitehall as Britain’s most media ubiquitous comic’ thanks to his deluge of TV shows, a newspaper column in The Guardian, comedy tours, book, award-winning podcast Hip Hop Saved My Life and countless other achievements.
In just seven years, this Sussex-born star has gone from being a secondary school maths teacher (at Hazelwick School in Crawley, the same school where he was a pupil and where he met his wife, fellow teacher Leesa,) to becoming a household name. He’s quite probably also the most famous Sri Lankan vegan in the world, a title he acquired after appearing on The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice.
Though his guest and panel appearances on popular shows such as A League of their Own, The Apprentice: Your Fired!, Have I Got News For You and QI drew him a solid fanbase drawn to his original brand of deadpan wit.
This summer saw the launch of Ranganathan’s BBC comedy show Ranganation, where he was joined by members of the public to discuss the week’s news.
One of them tattooed Ranganathan’s face on his leg and to show his appreciation - Ranganathan did the same, and got the man’s face tattooed on his leg. The show also features his mum Shanthi who became a personality in her own right after she accompanied him on a trip to Sri Lanka for TV show Asian Provocateur. More recently the two have been seen on his Dave show Judge Romesh, Ranganathan’s own take on a non-legal version of hit American show Judge Judy,where he uses his no-nonsense charm to solve minor disputes.
Ranganathan tried to break into Hollywood by moving to America along with his wife and three sons for six months to film TV show Just Another Immigrant where he, an unknown Brit, tried to fill a 6,000 seat theatre in LA. He remarked it was the ‘textbook dream – we were five minutes from Universal Studios, it was sunny, we had a pool’, and yet the experiment was perhaps his only fail, as just 397 people turned up prompting Ranganathan to return to Crawley.
Back on UK shores he seamlessly returned to the comedy circuit. In fact, touring has never been a problem. In 2016 his debut solo tour, Irrational sold over 100,000 tickets and saw him receive many plaudits. He is currently touring until April 2020 with his latest show with The Cynic’s Mixtape. At the time of writing, most dates had already sold out.
For those of you that prefer to get your chuckles at home, you won’t find it hard to track Ranganathan down on a TV channel. His Sky sitcom The Reluctant Landlord about a pub landlord recently returned for its second season. Though fictional, the inspiration for the tale came from his father who was a pub landlord in East Grinstead. Ranganathan hasn’t shied away from sharing the troubles of his childhood in which his one-time respectable well-earning accountant father left his mum for another woman and shortly after was imprisoned for fraud which led to the family home being repossessed leaving. Ranganathan and his brother had to leave private education , the family had to be rehoused to a council B&B. The financial difficulties didn’t end there.
In 2011 Ranganathan quit his job as a maths teacher to do comedy full time and had just three days of school left when his father died of a heart attack. He found himself a jobless father of one who now had the responsibility of sorting out a pub which was facing a financial crisis. In an interview, he admitted he admitted his family was totally broke – his father had wracked up debts and Ranganathan had just started out as a comedian.
It was comedy that saved Ranganathan, who admits he experienced a period of depression following this traumatic time.
His TV debut on Live at the Apollo in 2012 changed his life and got him noticed.
Next up, Ranganathan continues working with Sky 1 for Romesh Presents a new show in which he has curated comedy shorts co-created by Ranganathan's own production company, Ranga Bee Productions. His BBC 2 travel show The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan has taken him to Colombia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Zimbabwe and the second series recently aired.
Meanwhile, his double-award-winning podcast Hip Hop Saved My Life has attracted over a one million downloads. Guests on the show so far include Footballer Jamie Redknapp, Music Producer Mark Ronson and TV Presenter Louix Theroux , talking about their love for hip hop music.
The comic now has three children and they and wife Leesa were very much part of Just Another Immigrant – Ranganathan told an interviewer he knows that TV can be a fickle beast and that he needs to keep going as the attention falls on him but might not always.
