Nitin Ganatra

God's Dice, Soho Theatre, review

David Baddiel's debut is overlong and overblown.

Review: God's Dice at Soho Theatre

It is enjoyable to watch and the content is fascinating. It just needs a bit more spark to get where it needs to be.

Eaten By Lions review

This well-intentioned British comedy-drama has a lot going for it, with a cast of fresh new talent and seasoned career-actors handing in solid performances and who all strive to make this a fun and engaging watch.

Theatre review: End of the Pier, Park Theatre

It would spoil things to say exactly what happens, but this is a story not short on suprises.

EastEnders actor Nitin Ganatra is a nice man who plays nice, family man Masood on the show. But he's not a happy man. He wants to play more gritty, morally complex roles and sets out to convince his agent that he's not the meek and pleasant man that everyone thinks he is. He thinks that sleeping with the wife of the continuity man should be enough, but finds that he'll have to stop tiptoeing around the issue if he wants to make it as a dark and dangerous character. Ganatra plays himself in Stephen Keyworth's frothy comedy about the parallel perils of soap opera actors getting typecast and people in relationships getting stuck in a rut of mundane routine.

This is a comedy about adultery by Stephen Keyworth. Nitin Ganatra (real-life actor on EastEnders) plays himself, trying to show his agent he has a wider range than the "nice guy" roles he always plays and, to prove it, declares he's having an affair with the wife of an EastEnders crew member. The thing is, she's married to the continuity man on the show, the person who always has to know where things are and make sure nothing is moved to the wrong place. Bad news for lovers, perhaps, who may leave something under a bed that wasn't there before.

The pilot for Mumbai Calling was broadcast so long ago that the catch-up introduction to the new series was almost an episode in itself. For those who missed it, or have scant recall of what happened, the pilot saw Wembley-born Kenny Gupta (Sanjeev Bhaskar) sent off to Mumbai to manage a call centre, along with troubleshooting assessor Terri Johnson, who turned out to be a woman (Daisy Beaumont). An attractive woman. You get the idea.

And it's not bad. It's not great either, but there is enough funny material to inspire cautious optimism, and the central characters definitely show potential, which is the most important factor in a sitcom's success. There is no laughter track, always a good thing, and the sheer originality of the setting merits some acknowledgement. I say give it a chance.

Oddly enough, for a television comedy, many of the best scenes occurred as reported action off screen. Such as the episode's funniest moment in which the India-based team inadvertently directed a funeral cortege away from Milton Keynes Crematorium and into Woburn Safari Park, where the corpse was set upon by lions.

I laughed a lot at that bit and also derived much pleasure from Nitin Ganatra's over the top performance as the amiable but ineffectual middle manager Dev. Every good sitcom needs a scene stealer.