All right, let's do this.

Hello, Louis Theroux here, and welcome to another episode of my Spotify podcast called,

yes, the Louis Theru podcast.

I never get tired of that joke.

I do get a bit tired of it.

And today we are hosting the wonderful, talented actor, writer and all-round comedy legend, Sanjeev Bascar.

And I should also add to that friend, well sort of friend, friendly presence in my life,

in as much as I'd been aware of him

when I was working in the BBC in the 90s and early 2000s. He was coming to fame around the same time

in his trailblazing sketch show, first of all, goodness gracious me, which had four talented

sort of main actors, all of them of Asian heritage,

and which was themed along sort of the comedy of the British Asian experience.

And then after that, with his brilliant, groundbreaking talk show, which was called the Kumars

at number 42, in which the concept was that he was hosting

the chat show from his home with his parents and his granny all living in the house with him,

as these bona fide real stars came in, Phil Collins and Ronnie Corbett and many others, and were

interviewed. So it was a kind of improv, Larry Sanders-esque.

The other reference, I suppose, would be the King of Comedy.

If you've ever seen the Martin Scorsese film with Robert De Niro in which, he's called

Rupert Pupkin, I think, hosts a chat show from the basement of his mum's house.

So what I'm saying is he is and was a huge star and someone who kind of reinvented the genre.

How big was the Kumars at number 42?

...