Kulvinder Ghir, one of the stars of the award-winning Goodness Gracious Me, has said more needs to be done to improve Asian representation on television and in film, 25 years on from the comedy show’s first broadcast.
The BBC sketch show, which aired between 1998 and 2001, is seen as having been instrumental in changing perceptions of the south Asian community in the UK, challenging racism and paving the way for its stars, who included Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal and Nina Wadia.
Ghir said he was moved by the impact the show had had on the cultural landscape. But he said more British Asian historical dramas needed to be commissioned, and writers were too restricted by a need to be contemporary.
He said: “If we don’t talk about the past, we can’t sort out the future. So we need to look back. I wanted to write a film called Dusky Warriors, which is about the Sikh soldiers in the first world war, and I thought, OK, we’ve never seen Asians in a period drama and we don’t even have to go to India to go and film this … This is all set in Brighton Pavilion, 4,000 Indian soldiers were convalescing there.”
The film idea was rejected at the time, Ghir said, because it was not contemporary enough. “Even to this day, people say, well, how can you make this story contemporary? How can you make it relative to today?”
Speaking on the 25th anniversary of the release of Goodness Gracious Me, Ghir described the telling of British Asian history as vitally important. “If our kids get to know their history a little bit, maybe that might strengthen their ideology of being here,” he said.
He welcomed recent films such as The Personal History of David Copperfield, which starred Dev Patel, but added: “They’re putting actors in them to play the parts, but they’re not actually looking at the history itself, of our relationship with the British. What about the dramas that are actually true? Why can’t we look at them?”
Ghir will mark the show’s anniversary at a celebratory event featuring the cast and crew, to take place on 20 October in Birmingham, hosted by the DESIblitz Literature Festival, the UK’s leading arts festival for the British South Asian community.
He said: “The best thing is how our communities embraced [the show] and made it their own. And they could relate to it because somebody was telling their experiences and their stories. But you never had an inkling that it was going to live with me to this day.
“People were laughing with us and not at us and we had control over it … I think it was George Michael who turned around and met up with Nina one day and said, ‘oh my god, you’re my mom, my mom’s just like that, you know, eat, eat, come on, eat, come on, constantly feeding her family. I know where that’s coming from, that’s coming from poverty when you don’t have much … You get to know these histories and why these sayings are there and what place they come from’.”
Ghir said that in many ways he did not feel as though he had ever left the show. People often stopped him and reminded him of it, telling him their favourite catchphrases. “It’s definitely made a mark within British society, if not around the world itself, because I’ve had a lot of messages of similar people’s experiences as an immigrant, living somewhere else.”
He said he particularly loved how local communities embraced the show, describing it as a quintessential British story. “At that time, there weren’t really any programmes within television celebrating our cultural humour or aspects … but we used British ideas of irony and sarcasm to tell our stories.”
He was often asked if he would back a reboot of the show. He said there were artists from many communities today who could take the premise of the show and make it their own.
“That’s the great thing about Britain itself. It evolves, it keeps changing, because we get new communities that come over, and I think that’s brilliant. We celebrate that new community. And that’s where you can make a new Goodness Gracious Me. It doesn’t have to be necessarily Indian. It can be Somali or Bangladeshi, or Middle Eastern.”
