Meera Syal

The Kumars return to celebrity-obsessed Britain

The Kumars' Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal on the return of the family that welcomes celebrity into its living room.

Back after a seven-year absence, the Kumars return with some top-of-the-range acting talent dropping in on their downsized Hounslow home for a dysfunctional family grilling.

With Olivia Colman holding her own against an onslaught of inappropriate questions from Sanjeev (Sanjeev Bhaskar), Daniel Radcliffe getting his cheeks tweaked by Ummi (Meera Syal) and US comedian Chevy Chase quivering under the gaze of new landlady Hawney (Harvey Virdi) we're all set for the chuckles to pick up right where they left off.

Well, apart from the fact they're now on Sky, not the Beeb, so let's hope they haven't left too many of their old fans at home alone.

A three-hour compilation called Greatest Stand Up Comedians proved this to exhaustion, by butchering the stage routines of 50 famous comics.

Without the build-up, the timing and the audience rapport, most of the gags weren't even recognisable as jokes. It was like listening to five-second snatches of songs - pointless and frustrating. One of the rare moments worth a laugh came from Lily Savage: 'I've got a brother, our Archie. I hate him. The only reason I speak to him is you never know when you'll need a kidney.'

Shows like this are mostly padding, waffle from talking heads with just a taste of the real thing. That's usually because short clips can be broadcast under 'fair usage' agreements, with no fee; longer clips cost money.

So most of the three hours boiled down to different ways of saying something was funny: 'He's just an incredibly brilliant comedian'; 'Hilarious, I mean hilarious'; 'He is one of the comedy greats, no doubt.'

In case we hadn't noticed how incredibly brilliantly hilarious this all was, narrator Meera Syal kept saying, 'There's more merriment, wit and hilarity on its way,' or, 'We've giggled, tittered and guffawed our way to the end.'

But the real reason for the one-star rating is that Michael McIntyre was rated the seventh most uproarious comic ever . . . 37 places above Frankie Howerd. That's not even funny.

Talking dirty in front of Mum and Dad

A new series of columns in which comedians discuss their comedy and the relationship with their parents. Includes articles form Adam Buxton, Nina Conti, Meera Syal and Jack Whitehall.

In this week's episode of The Reunion - the first in a new series - monstrous egos were nowhere to be found and tone was, for much of the time, joyful. Presenter Sue MacGregor, best known for calmly making mincemeat of politicians on The Today Programme for nearly 20 years, reunited the brains behind the BBC comedy Goodness Gracious Me, which first aired on Radio 4 in 1996 and later transferred to television. There were no histrionics here, just pride in a series that helped break the largely white, xenophobic mould of mainstream comedy.

Goodness Gracious Me - named in "tribute" to the Peter Sellers-Sophia Lore song inspired by their 1960 film The Millionairess - was the first series in the history of the BBC that was conceived, written and performed entirely by British-Asians. In examining the tensions between traditional Asian ways and modern British life, it yielded a host of celebrated sketches including "Going for an English", in which the cast get tanked up on lassis and order 12 bread rolls and a pint of ketchup, and "The Six Million Rupee Man", a daft re-working of The Six Million Dollar Man.

Here the show's major players, including Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal and producer Anil Gupta, discussed their early days as the toast of British comedy like people who couldn't believe their luck. "There was a general feeling amongst British Asians that they were finding their identity, and we were part of that," noted Bhaskar, who had, until the show's early success, been working in marketing.

But there was a discernible sadness too, in the fact that the door they had opened for the next generation of Asian performers seemed to slam shut after them. After three series, Good Gracious Me was cancelled and, soon after, the BBC and its rivals seem to forget the non-white audience. "We used to play the spot the-Asian-on-the-telly game when I was a kid and I find that I'm doing that again," sighed Syal.

If the irony of making this point on Radio 4 - the station that first championed them and yet remains dominated by white, middle-class presenters - had occurred to Syal, she was too polite to mention it.

Meera Syal hits out over lack of Asian faces on TV

Goodness Gracious Me star Meera Syal has criticised British television for not showing enough Asian faces.

Sanjeev Bhaskar: It was weird marrying my 'grandmother'

After a six-year absence, The Kumars at No. 42 returns to our screens in 2013. Now, its host, Sanjeev Bhaskar, is married to Meera Syal, who plays his grandmother in the popular BBC comedy series.

Robert Webb, actor and comedian, opens the diary he kept when he was 17 for the benefit of host (and comedian) Rufus Hound and an enthralled audience. His entries include one about going to a party and kissing a girl he didn't really fancy. I always listen to this programme, now in its fourth series. But I often wonder whether a real conversation with the diaries' authors (who have included Meera Syal, Sheila Hancock, Michael Winner and Julian Clary) would produce something more satisfying than some wisecracks from Hound and lots of easy audience laughs.

Meera Syal interview

Growing up as part of the only Indian family in a West Midlands mining village meant the actress and writer was always an outsider. And that, she says, was a very good thing. Jonathan Owen meets Meera Syal.