Meera Syal: ‘I still don’t know why the BBC cancelled Goodness Gracious Me’

Meera Syal’s life is the stuff of movies – specifically Anita and Me, the film adaptation of Syal’s semi-autobiographical novel that revisited her childhood growing up in a mining village near Wolverhampton. Anita and Me, which is now a set text for English GCSE, was published in 1996 and in the intervening years, Syal has, among other things, co-written and starred in the groundbreaking BBC sketch series Goodness Gracious Me, played her now-husband Sanjeev Bhaskar’s grandmother in The Kumars at No. 42, co-written Andrew Lloyd Webber’s West End musical Bombay Dreams, won an Olivier award for playing Shirley Valentine on stage, appeared in films including Paddington 2 and Yesterday, written a novel inspired by India’s surrogacy industry and been awarded an MBE, CBE and damehood. So she’s been busy. But the one thing Syal had not done was write a work of non-fiction – until now. Her new book Vigilauntie is a memoir inspired by the death of her parents. Syal’s father, Surendra, died in 2018 and her mother, Surinder Kaur, died in late 2023. “There is nothing like being orphaned to make you look at your life through a long lens,” she says. “You are acutely aware you’re the end of the line now. You are the matriarch and you will be next.” In case that makes it sound like Vigilauntie is a melancholy reflection on mortality and the inevitability of death, it is worth stressing that the book is anything but: it is funny and wise, inspiring and deeply moving. It is easy to see Syal as she is now – successful and beloved – but the book is a portrait of the artist as a young woman when she felt like an absolute outsider. “I hope other people that feel like outsiders find it comforting and maybe even reassuring and inspiring,” she says, adding that “the thing that makes you feel alone and different is probably your superpower.” I ask her to describe what she was like when she was a teenage girl. “I was isolated on many levels,” she says. “I wanted to do something creative but didn’t know how to get access to it.” Syal made her stage debut in a nursery production of Sleeping Beauty and had started writing poems and short stories by the age of six. “The key to my survival in Britain depended on being seen and heard,” she writes in her book, “because if I didn’t record and communicate the lives and experiences I saw around me, why anyone would really know why we were here and why it mattered?” The aunties referred to in the book’s title were the women the young Syal saw of her mother’s generation: the Punjabi friends Syal’s parents gathered around them on arriving in Britain. “You would see those incredible women that were virtually born into a cage,” she recalls. “I would think about what they could have done if they were given the opportunities – if someone had listened to them or if they had got to tell their story. That really scared me, being around that. I didn’t want to be that person.” Syal in rehearsals for ‘The Children’ at Lyric Hammersmith, which runs until 3 October (Photo: Helen Maybanks) Syal left home to study English and Drama at Manchester University, where Ben Elton, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson had all studied a few years earlier. “People talked about them in hallowed terms,” she says. “Ben was so prolific and Rik and Ade were performing on the comedy circuit. I think they were maybe even still in Manchester when I started my first year.” It was in Manchester that Syal learned her craft. “Manchester gave me everything,” she says. “I grew into myself because, unlike drama school, you were not waiting for someone to cast you. You could create that work and put it on.” There is a hugely upsetting moment in her book when Syal describes standing at a bus stop in Fallowfield in Manchester after a late rehearsal and a group of young lads run past her to spit in her face one after the other. She was forced to clean herself up with pages from a notebook. “They did it for a laugh,” she says. How did she process that? “There’s a sort of inevitability about it,” she says. “I just thought – it’s my turn now. There’s a bit of you that accepts that it will happen but it also puts you in a place of shame – you feel so diminished and angry afterwards.” The spitting incident took place more than four decades ago, in what we like to hope was another Britain. Syal is not so sure it is all that different, however much she herself has changed. “If I happen to be on the streets when Reform UK are doing one of their marches,” she says, “and they start turning on people randomly, like they have done, no one’s going to say, ‘You’ve got an OBE, I’m not going to spit on you.’ They’ll just go, ‘There’s a brown lady.’” Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Nina Wadia and Kulvindar Ghir in ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ (Photo: BBC) After graduating from Manchester with a double first, Syal took her play One of Us – which she had co-written and performed while a student, about an Asian girl who runs away to become an actress – to the National Student Drama Festival and then the Edinburgh Fringe. One show in Edinburgh was attended by the theatre director Carole Hayman, who offered Syal the chance to take part in a new play whose six-month tour would end with a run at London’s Royal Court Theatre. “If there’s one sliding-doors moment in the whole book it’s definitely that one,” she says. “If Carole had not come to see the play I would probably be a child psychotherapist today.” If that is one of the book’s most cheering hinge moments, Syal describes a bleaker incident later when she is sexually assaulted by an older Asian man. “It’s obviously quite a personal thing to put out there,” Syal says, “but I included it because it came at a real crossroads in my life where I could very easily have given up but that anger became a motor and made me want to properly sit down and write.” Syal spent the rest of the 80s and early 90s building a solid screen career, from an early role in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) to joining the cast of BBC’s The Real McCoy (1991), then writing the BBC drama My Sister Wife (1992) and the screenplay for Bhaji on the Beach (1993) before joining the writing and performing team of Goodness Gracious Me, which began on BBC Radio 4 in 1996. It is that series that first brought Syal, along with her three costars, national attention, as well as inspiring a generation of younger South Asian talent. Goodness Gracious Me ran for three series before being cancelled by the BBC. “We’d won awards, we were being feted. The BBC literally got brownie points for having this show on,” she says. “We had critical success, commercial success. I still don’t know why it was cancelled.” Syal has recently been busier than ever (Image via Emily Hargreaves) Syal went from Goodness Gracious Me to The Kumars at No. 42, where she played Sanjeev Bhaskar’s grandmother. The couple had worked together on Goodness Gracious Me, but after Syal’s divorce from her first husband in 2002, she and Bhaskar ended up dating and later marrying. “It was really organic,” she says. “That is the magic of a friendship that develops into a romance, because you already know each other so well in a very honest way.” Syal recently turned 65 and in the past few years has been busier than ever with an Olivier nominated role in A Tupperware of Ashes at the National Theatre, screen roles in Mrs Sidhu Investigates and The Split and a film career that includes Paddington 2, Yesterday and Doctor Strange. And yet, despite the busy diary – she is due to star in Lucy Kirkwood’s play The Children at the Lyric Hammersmith in early September – she remains anxious about work drying up. “It’s still with me, the immigrant fear, the need for security,” she admits. “I still worry when I don’t work, but I am more than halfway through my life so whatever I do needs to be meaningful in some way. It needs to be challenging, life-affirming and joyful.” These days, what with her damehood, Bafta fellowship and the like, Syal is, despite her protestations otherwise, a fully paid-up member of the arts establishment. How did it feel to write the book and spend time with the teenage Meera? “I wanted to give her a big hug,” she says. “If you’d have told me that that little chubby brown girl from Wolverhampton would get to do the thing I love for a living – I mean, it was not even a pipe dream. The overwhelming feeling I came away with from writing the book was that I have been so very lucky.” Meera Syal’s memoir ‘Vigilauntie: A Memoir – Innit?’ is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson