In a former life, the Sri Lankan/Brit known as Amara Karunakaran earned a 2:1 in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University and spent two years working in mergers and acquisitions in the City. She’d always loved acting though, and the move away from school/college productions into the real, theatre-free world of high finance convinced her that she was on the wrong path. After quitting her day job, and making her mother cry, she entered drama school, graduated, wrote/directed a short film, and promptly thereafter scored a leading role in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. According to an interview for ReDiff: "For someone like me, who is just starting her career, this was heavenly... In terms of what is expected of Indian actresses, my role may surprise some people, but that is what I like about this character. She lives outside the box but she is not a shallow character. She too has feelings and she is hurt in the end by the whirlwind affair with a stranger... It was fun and challenging to play Rita, but it was also important to me that the role doesn't fit any cliché."
In the same interview Karan enthuses over her then forthcoming turn in the St Trinian's reboot: “I thought Darjeeling Limited was a gift from the gods, but this film was an even bigger gift because I play a character called Peaches. Here am I, of South Asian origin, playing a colour-blind role. That itself was a stimulating challenge." I’ve never met the woman, but she comes across in the video interviews I’ve seen as terribly chirpy and charming... very genteel... I’m not sure there are many people who could get away with speaking so highly of such a minor role, and make you actually want to believe the hype... but somehow, she does. Apparently she’s rocking some sort of anti-snark shield... she’s simply too darn adorable to mock.
Unfortunately, that appears to be where her film career faltered... she isn’t even listed as a cast member for the St Trinian's sequel... although cinema isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of acting, and she trod the boards in several plays (including a turn as Michelle Gomez’s sister, in an RSC production of The Taming of the Shrew). She’s also inspired a central character in the comic book I’m writing... so let’s hope that gets picked up and adapted into a movie and/or TV series, so that she can claim the lead role she so richly deserves!
Bless her... even when she loses, she still manages to steal the limelight (and the laughs):
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xak2vy_ss-at-emmys_shortfilms
I've been making my through The Ultimate boxset of Goodness Gracious Me, an all-Asian sketch show which ran on the BBC between 1998 and 2001. Although the insane cheapness of the sale price was a good thing from my POV, it's also slightly saddening because it suggests that the series has fallen out of favour. Throughout the run there were sketches specifically referring to how being Asian had finally become fashionable ("Brown is the new Black!", one character claimed), but in the final series they depicted a white man dumping his Asian girlfriend, because her ethnicity was no longer considered cool enough. Has the same thing happened to GGM? I hope not, because it is my firm belief that The Future is Brown™ and the sooner we accept that fact, the smoother the transition will be... comedy, as ever, should be the conduit for enlightenment...
The core cast was made up of Sanjeev Bhaskar (OBE), Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Syal (MBE) and Nina Wadia, playing Desi characters of all nationalities, ages and backgrounds. The Token Whites were played by Dave Lamb, and various actresses including Fiona Smack the Pony Allen. Bhaskar and Syal were also part of the main writing team, and later went on to make The Kumars at No. 42 (and a baby) together. Ghir is probably best known to international audiences as the brother-in-law in Bend It Like Beckham, while Wadia is probably best known to international audiences as, er, the woman trying to break up a fight at his wedding... but a while back she joined the cast of long-running soap opera EastEnders, which has boosted her profile again.
As noted ad nauseam, I am not a big fan of running gags and catchphrases... but GGM was full of them. In fact, it was pretty much built on them. But at least they had the common decency to vary the context in which the catchphrases cropped up, as their characters travelled far and wide across the country (even if the location was only suggested by a few props on stage). The show's strongest sketches were the ones which addressed the culture clash between East and West directly, usually by turning the tables on an unsuspecting Token Whitey, by making him/her the minority in a strange and foreign land, and seeing how he/she likes it! The most successful, and most famous of these sketches is titled "Going for an English", and sees a group of drunken Indians visiting their local English restaurant on a Friday night to cause trouble. Some pedants over at Wikipedia have pointed out that they were not the first comedians to conceive of this humorous scenario... but they were the first actual Asians to act it out, so kiss my chuddies!
What was great about the show was that, as a young white Brit living in a city with a large Asian population, it provided some much needed cultural sensitivity training for me. In theory it should be the easiest thing in the world to pronounce another person's name correctly, no matter where in the world they're from... it is, after all, only a string of simple syllables... yet we can't always control the sounds our mouths make, when trying to wrap them around unfamiliar words. The GGM team were there to remind us that things always seem simple and normal to the people who grow up with them, but that doesn't mean they won't confuse the crap out of strangers and foreigners. Speaking of which, many of the sketches feature lines in Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu, which get big laughs from the audience, and go straight over my head. But I dig that. I like the fact they didn't cop out and pander to a mainstream white audience. Having worked in a Deaf school, I have a vague understanding of what it's like to be in the minority, surrounded by a strange language, and what a relief it was to get back to the staff room and be able to talk with my mouth again. I don't subscribe to the theory that a shared skin colour, language or culture necessarily equate to shared values and interests... and indeed, I remember not every Asian kid who discussed the show within my earshot was as keen on it as their friends were... but it must have been a breath of fresh air to many viewers.
In stark contrast to ManStrokeWoman, GGM works through a wide array of classes, religions, occupations and accents. The cast were all very talented and adaptable comic actors, and it's fun to see them swap places from one sketch to the next... you never knew who was going to be playing the grown ups, and who would be playing the kids... you never knew where in the world you'd end up, between India and England... and you never knew exactly who or what would be the butt of the joke, until it landed. For no apparent reason, Bhaskar also re-dubbed footage of Skippy, as a lairy, leering Skipinder the Punjabi Kangaroo! Oh, and they always liked to go out on a song, with either a parody or an original number. To be fair, not every sketch was laugh-out-loud funny, and it's true that they sometimes had a point to make in place of a joke... but as the first all-Asian comedy show, and probably the most prominent brown faces on British TV, they must have been under an enormous amount of pressure (spoken or unspoken) to please all camps, while also trying to please themselves. That's the bugger of being a trailblazer, I would imagine. But they managed to keep an admirable balance between the social commentary and the slapstick, which... well, pretty much no other British sketch show has ever attempted or accomplished.
Overall, it's hard to say what impact GGM had on audiences in general, but it came along at just the right time for me, to help take some of the edge off my own cultural alienation, and for that I'll always be grateful. It was also very funny, and remains so to this day, thanks to the energetic performances, and endearing characters. Encouraging people to laugh at themselves is a valuable public service too, of course... especially "well-meaning" whites like myself who try to clumsily cherry-pick parts of other cultures and religions they don't really understand. In my case, it isn't really driven by fashion, so much as curiosity and a sincere search for spiritual advancement and understanding... but still, sometimes it's good to be reminded whose turf one is trampling on. Innit.
More treasure from the supermarket bargain bin... Anita & Me, an Anglo-Asian dramedy from 2002, adapted by Meera Syal from her semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. To quote from the back of the box: "It's 1972 and 12 year-old Meena is poised to the brink of her teenage years. Torn between her familys culture and the escape offered by the rock and roll era, her daily life is turned upside down by the arrival of the blonde, beautiful and outrageous Anita Rutter." The blurb also claims that this is "an hilarious British comedy in the tradition of East is East and Bend It Like Beckham". Personally, I think that comparison is slightly misleading... true they do all deal with brown people living in a white country, but the styles and stories are quite different. It's easy to see why this flick wasn't quite the roaring international success that Beckham was... since it doesn’t have quite the same feel-good factor. While Beckham had its fair share of tears and tantrums, it has nothing on Anita, which at times feels almost like a thriller! Personally I can handle watching most movie monsters without breaking a sweat, but when there are skinheads swaggering around, pulling knives on kids... I start to clench up. It's all far too tense and ugly for me.
Still with two of the stars/writers of Goodness Gracious Me in the cast, there are also plenty of laughs to be had. Sanjeev Bhaskar gives a nice subtle turn as Anita's father, with Syal getting to have a little more fun as the poor girl's bullying aunty. Meanwhile, the gorgeous Ayesha Dharker gives a great performance as the mother, even if some of her scenes seem a teeny bit stagey, script-wise. Chandeep Uppal is impressive as Meena, with a lot of very difficult scenes and tonal shifts to navigate... since then, she's had starring roles in the children’s sitcom My Life as a Popat, and a double-headed meta-comedy called Echo Beach/Moving Wallpaper, which is rather too complicated to explain here. She's still in her teens, but seems to have worked consistently since her big break, which is heartening. Overall the cast were very good, and really drew you in to the ups and downs of their characters... whether your nerves could handle it or not! For an adaptation it worked remarkably well, I thought... when a novel is condensed into screenplay format, it can often seem a little flimsy or rushed on-screen, but Syal managed to keep a good balance between the breadth of the story, and the depth of the characters.
I wasn't surprised to discover that Syal's novel is now a part of the school syllabus. The film has an educational vibe to it, in the best sense of that word... it doesn't talk down to kids the way that Disney films tend to, pretending that were all shiny, happy people, who'll all get to be rock stars someday. There's an upbeat innocence to it, but it also peeks into some very dark and very real corners. I remember when I was at school, we studied Roots and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry... which I got a lot out of, even if we did have to suffer through the spectacle of our white, sixty year-old English teacher adopting a "black" "Southern" accent to read certain passages aloud. Oy! There are some people out there, and I know because I've had the great misfortune of conversing with them, who believe that it is a crime to take classic old-timey texts (written by those pesky "dead white men") off the syllabus, in favour of more modern and "politically correct" texts, which may not have quite such lofty literary aspirations. We call these people "idiots". Don't get me wrong, I love a bit of Shakespeare and Wilde now and again... but the fact remains that they don't really prepare a child for the world in which they actually have to survive and thrive. They don't teach children very much about the dilemmas facing them on a daily basis. Even as a ten year old, I can remember thinking that it was wrong to bully other children simply because they were a different colour... but it was nice to have my hunch confirmed by what the teachers were feeding us. While I feel I benefited from learning about slavery, and African-American Civil Rights, it's good to know that talented British writers of Syal's standing are producing texts which hit a little closer to home.
In an interview about the film, Syal confessed: "It's very sad but I wanted to be blonde and called Sharon... I just wanted to be like the other girls. I was from a culture that was different, there were no positive representations of who I was anywhere... Britain was not ready for a multi-cultural environment when I was growing up in the Seventies. It was a difficult time because Enoch Powell had made his famous speech and I remember my parents talking about it. They really did keep suitcases on top of the wardrobe because we might have to leave tomorrow. It was very insecure. It’s a different world for my little girl... Our house is like the United Nations. The other day she had two of her Jewish friends round and the East End working-class girl who lives next door, they were all there doing the dance routines from Bombay Dreams. I thought, God, this is brilliant... It makes me very hopeful for her generation. It's how children should grow up."
