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Arts And Crafts
COMEDY MAN
Quentin Falk talks to the prolific Sanjeev Bhaskar, writer, performer, presenter and BAFTA jury chairman
Sanjeev Bhaskar, still perhaps best known as one quarter of the Goodness Gracious Me comedy ensemble, is in immi- nent danger of becoming ubiq- uitous. He was just settling into his first substantial film role earlier this year on location in Trinidad when a jokey, three-part documentary he conceived and presented first aired on Channel 4. That was the shamelessly titled Position Impossible: In Search Of The Kama Sutra. “Yes,” confesses the irre- pressible Bhaskar, “I did think of the title first and then work backwards. I am, as the Americans say, so busted.”
No sooner had he completed his Caribbean stint – opposite Om Puri, Jimi Mistry, Ayesha Dharkar, Aasif Mandvi and James Fox in Merchant Ivory’s The Mystic Masseur – than he was off to New York. This was initially at the request of Mistry who wanted Bhaskar’s help as his dialect coach on a new film, The Guru Of Sex, co-starring Heather Graham and Marisa Tomei.
In fact, the 36-year-old ended up as an adviser to a quartet of actors as well as being an sort of unofficial script ‘doc- tor’ and even a cameo performer in the Working Title production as, Bhaskar recalls with relish, “a mad chef.”
Then it was back to Britain to begin active pre-production on a new six-part comedy series for BBC2. Tentatively titled The Kumars At Number 42, it’s derived from an idea Bhaskar first hatched about five years ago with radio in mind.
Radio, and time, passed before The Kumars were resurrected for TV with Bhaskar sharing writing chores with Sharat Sardana and Richard Pinto, both Goodness Gracious Me alumni. He also plays the central role of a rather
spoilt son whose parents indulge his dream of being a TV chat show host by building a studio for him in the family’s Wembley garden.
The only proviso is that they be allowed to sit in on his interviews with star guests – “anyone who’s won an Oscar,” Bhaskar suggests, helpfully. This clearly innovative mix of sitcom and improv will also feature another GGM favourite, Meera Syal, as Granny.
Somewhere in between all this activity fore-and-aft the camera, he also managed to boss – with suitable gravi- tas, he insists - a pair of this
year’s BAFTA television juries,
for Innovation and Sound
Factual. Oh, yes, there’s also
that three-film writing deal
with Miramax...
It has, to be sure, been a remarkable rise-and-rise for the London-born Bhaskar who only switched to performing professionally about six years ago after starting to carve out
a career in marketing following a degree at the University of Hertfordshire (“the old Hatfield Poly,” he smiles). After bemoaning the fact he hadn’t tackled drama at school, he made up for lost time by writing and acting at college.
A radio version of Goodness Gracious Me was eventually followed by three TV series of the show – in which he co-starred with Kulvinder Ghir, Nina Wadia and, of course, Syal.
Now, a bubbly and seemingly unaf- fected thirtysomething, the big screen
beckons for him as brightly as the small. Which is the fulfil- ment of a dream because Bhaskar is the consummate film buff.
This may, he discovered quite belatedly, have been in the genes for it turns out his when his father was 15 he ran away from home to join a the- atre company in Bombay. Then, when Bhaskar pere
came to England he also had dreams, in between more mundane employment, of getting into films.
After acting with Kenneth Branagh and Paul McGann in a Jack Cardiff-lit short, Dance Of Shiva, Bhaskar fils landed the “pivotal” role - “it’s like that Hamlet joke, you know the one which goes, ‘It’s about this Gravedigger...’ - in Notting Hill, a telling two-minute cameo bad-mouthing Julia Roberts in that restaurant scene.
Set in the early 50s, The Mystic Masseur, the first ever adaptation of a novel by Booker Prize-winning author VS Naipaul, gives him the his juiciest film part yet as the hero Ganesh’s best friend and confidant, Beharry.
“Merchant Ivory have such a great reputation for their films. My parents knew them from their earliest work in India like Shakespeare Wallah and The Householder. It was just so strange to watch one of their films and then sud- denly find myself on set with them, actually to be involved in that heritage of filmmaking,” he confides.
Though the subject matter is gen- tly satirical, Bhaskar had, he admits, to suppress his natural comedy in the steaming heat of Trinidad. However, once a funnyman always a funnyman, resulting in the odd giggling co-star and the occasionally irritated director (Ismail Merchant).
Fretting about the Trini-accent, he was doing a scene one day with James Fox and asked him about A Passage To India and Alec Guinness’s decidedly dodgy local inflection. “‘Ah, yes, dear old Alec’, James said. ‘He did give it a go.’ Mine’s a rare case of an actor say- ing, ‘I don’t want to be Alec Guinness,’” says Bhaskar. ■
Photo: Sanjeev Bhaskar with Ayesha Dharkar between takes on the set of The Mystic Masseur
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