British actor, comedian and TV presenter Sanjeev Bhaskar may be best known for his sketch comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, but he has since segued into more dramatic acting roles, such as playing DI Sunny Khan in Unforgotten.
Born in Ealing in 1963, Sanjeev grew up in Hounslow. He’s the son of Punjabi parents, and met his wife of 20 years, actress Meera Syal, while working on Goodness Gracious Me in the 1990s.
Bhaskar first grew to prominence in the 1990s for Goodness Gracious Me (Credit: BBC Studios/YouTube)
Sanjeev Bhaskar met wife Meera Syal during their Goodness Gracious Me era
Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar both starred in Goodness Gracious Me, a BBC sketch comedy show that ran from 1996 until 2001, first as a radio show and then on TV.
Its stars were Sanjeev and Meera, plus Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia.
Immensely popular in its day and a touchstone for British Asians working in the arts and entertainment industry to this day, Goodness Gracious Me found good-natured laughs in the lived experience of British Asians in the UK.
Many years after they started working closely with each other, Sanjeev and Meera went on a promo trip to Sydney in 2003. The flight from the UK lasted 23 hours – plenty of time to fall in love!
I had no filter and Meera was very nice about it.
“We were on such a high,” he told G2 Magazine in 2022. “We were being flown first class to promote the show, which had been a hit over there; Meera was releasing her film Anita & Me; and we had just found out that we’d gotten to number one on the UK chart with our Comic Relief single with Gareth Gates.”
“The thing with 23 hours in someone’s company is that you get the raw version of each other – especially me, since I can’t sleep on a plane. I had no filter and Meera was very nice about it. It was an intense period, but that intensity made us both realise that we wanted to hang out with each other more.”
Sanjeev and Meera are among the nation’s most prominent British Asian power couples (Credit: BAFTA/YouTube)
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