Meera Syal

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2003

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor and writer Meera Syal. She was born in the sixties after her parents had immigrated here from the Punjab and brought up in Essington, a Staffordshire mining village five miles north east of Wolverhampton. She studied English and Drama at Manchester University.

Her one woman show One Of Us went to the Edinburgh Festival where she was spotted by a director from the Royal Court Theatre in London and offered an immediate equity card. Meera gave up her academic plans and moved to London to act in the theatre. She wrote and starred in 'My Sister Wife' for BBC2 and moved on to write and perform in the popular Goodness Gracious Me and to play the flirtatious granny in the Kumars at Number 42. She has written the script for the London musical Bombay Dreams which will be going to Broadway.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Young, Gifted and Black by Bob and Marcia Book: Hindi-English dictionary Alternative to Bible: Bhagvadgita - ancient Hindu text Luxury: A piano

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My class away this week is an actor and a writer. She was born in a
0:26.8	Midlands mining village to a family which had emigrated from the Punjab. A
0:30.8	dutiful daughter and clever, she went to the local girls high school and then to Manchester University.
0:36.0	She'd pretended she'd like to become a doctor, but secretly she'd always yearned to write and perform.
0:41.0	She didn't have to wait long. She was snapped up by the
0:44.4	Royal Court Theatre in London and before she was 30 she'd written a three-part
0:48.0	series for the BBC. And then came the big one. Goodness Gracious Me
0:52.0	transferred from Radio 4 to BBC 2 and it became an instant
0:56.3	hit. The same brand of humour is now getting good ratings in the Kumar's at number 42.
1:01.5	She's the Grandma. All this success represents a coming of age for
1:06.2	Asian culture in Britain today and she is at the heart of it. Brown is the new black, she's
1:11.5	claimed. Not entirely seriously, I suspect.
1:14.0	And more in earnest, she said, Cultural schizophrenia made my whole generation
1:18.9	sparky and creative. She is Mira Sial.
1:22.3	Or perhaps you were serious about Brown is the New Black, I'm not sure.
1:26.0	But tell me, you know, how did it manifest itself?
1:28.0	When do you feel it became trendy to be Asian?
1:32.0	Ooh, I can't believe that exact date in it, but I would say around about the time of goodness
1:37.1	gracious me.
1:38.1	So it's the last five, seven years?
	...

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