Just one big embarrassing family

By FRANCES GRANT

Some families are a bit different. Bring a guest home, somebody famous say, and suddenly all their quirks and embarrassing foibles are thrown into sharp relief.

There's Dad talking to Donny Osmond about how to wire a house, Mum hasn't quite registered that she has a former teen pop idol sitting on her sofa and, oh no, Granny is all over him like a rash.

Parents are instructed by God to embarrass their children, says Sanjeev Bhaskar, host of The Kumars at No 42, the British chat show in which the whole family come along to take part in his interviews with his famous guests.

The idea for the show, says Bhaskar on the phone from his home in London, came from mulling over how his Indian immigrant parents had behaved when he introduced a new girlfriend to them. "My dad said, 'Pleased to meet you, how much does your father earn?"' His mum chipped in with, "I'm terribly sorry about my son, he's always been terrible at handling rejection."

"When I started acting a couple of years later I thought, gosh, I wonder, if I made a famous friend and I took them home, how my parents would react. And I thought they're not going to react any differently."

Bhaskar ditched his marketing job to become a comedian and actor, doing stand-up and gaining attention on British-Indian comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me.

As Mr and Mrs Kumar (Vincent Ebrahim and Indira Joshi) were inspired by his real parents, so Sanjeev Kumar and Sanjeev Bhaskar are also closely related.

"I was asked in a radio interview by a guy who I know well, 'Is Sanjeev Kumar based on you?' And I said, 'Well look, he lives at home with his parents and he can't get a girlfriend. And he's a wannabe. Does that answer your question?' And he said, 'Yeah, I thought it was based on you'.

"But in many ways he has more of the chutzpah than I ever had or will have. There's something I find bizarrely charming about those people who are absolutely blind to criticism, who have that self-delusion and self-belief."

One character who's an original is the granny, Sushila, played by fellow Goodness Gracious Me cast member Meera Syal. "I wanted to have an older character in there that was the most with it within a family. Most of the time, the oldest character is a bit slow and doesn't know what's going on. I thought I'd like to have an older character in there who really does have a finger on the pulse."

Bhaskar sold the character to a dubious Syal as the funkiest and most outrageous person in the house but he says Syal has taken Sushila "way beyond anything I had imagined".

In tonight's episode, for instance, Sushila can hardly keep her hands off Donny Osmond, who she subjects to a full blast of saucy Punjabi innuendo.

Syal, an actor, writer and film-maker, whose movie Anita and Me is showing in cinemas here, says Sushila is typical of a certain type of Indian widow in Britain. "Indian widows are rather feisty, particularly that generation ... for many of them widowhood is the first time they've ever been able to please themselves. They're not shrinking violets, they're women that are full of passion and they're grabbing the last bit of their lives with both hands."

After Granny's had her way with them, guests on The Kumars surely must need a recovery room. "I think the reason I get away with so much is that she is an old lady. Old ladies get away with so much, she can be as cheeky as she likes because nobody quite takes you seriously. They know that she's really not going to jump them in the hallway."

In the case of pop star Donny Osmond, however, it appears that danger was close. Granny's enthusiasm for Osmond was indeed real. As a girl, Syal was a diehard Donny fan. "I was, sadly, and that for me was the most exciting episode," says Syal. "It was one of those rare bits of TV where you actually fulfil a childhood fantasy and that was mine. Except I was dressed as an old lady, which was a bit of a shame."

Bhaskar lets slip that Syal begged him to keep Osmond talking afterwards so she could change out of old-lady disguise. Guests on the The Kumars meet only Bhaskar in advance. When they are introduced to the rest of the family, the cameras are rolling.

While the introductory scenes are scripted, much of the rest is spontaneous, Bhaskar says. He and Syal, in particular, ad lib a lot of their performance.

He seeks guests who are in on the joke and, like Osmond, who saw the show on a visit to England and asked to come on it, are willing to play along.

"Donny was fantastic. He really knew how to play the game. And that amazing singing-gargling thing he did. There you go, if you're a Mormon you can do things like that."

Syal agrees: "You always get the impression he's a bit kind of cheesy, a bit plastic. But actually he was a really funny guy."

The appeal of the show for guests, says Syal, is the chance to show that they're good sports who can take a joke, which does their image no harm. And Bhaskar says its bicultural nature could be an advantage. "I made an off-the-cuff remark once that any guest that comes on the show can at least prove that they're not racist. That was taken to be a bit more heavy than I intended.

The Kumars is part of a creative blossoming in film and TV from Britain's Indian-Asian community. Syal's film Anita and Me is based on her semi-autobiographical novel: "What it was like growing up in a tiny [British] village] in the middle of nowhere as an Indian kid with a big imagination."

Syal also wrote the film Bhaji on the Beach, which was directed by Gurinder Chadha, who had a worldwide hit with Bend It Like Beckham.

Syal and Bhaskar, 39, say they were born in the right place at the right time, in creative terms. Both are second generation who, unlike their immigrant parents, were confident enough with the new culture to find their own voice.

Bhaskar say there is also an entertainment tradition in Indian culture, with children always expected to do party turns. "But it's odd, you're made to do party turns until about 15. But if at 16 you'd said, 'I want to be an actor', then it was the next thing up from prostitution. It was like you'd suggested dismembering a member of your family."

But both point out that The Kumars has a universality. The format has been sold around the world - which, says Bhaskar, offers some interesting perspectives. "I asked this guy from Bombay how it was doing in India and he said, 'Oh, it is doing terribly in India, only 40 million viewers'."

The immigrant experience is the same everywhere, he says. And Indian parents don't have a monopoly on that gift for embarrassing their children.

When his real-life parents come to the recording of the show, they don't appear to recognise themselves in The Kumars. "We had Minnie Driver on. Afterwards in the green room we were having drinks and I introduced my parents to Minnie Driver. And my mum actually said to her, 'If you do need a place to stay in London, we have a spare room'."

On Screen

* Who: Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal

* What: The Kumars at No 42

* Where: One, 9.30pm

* Also: Anita and Me in cinemas now