Content area
Full text
Channel 4's new comedy from IWC has a local flavour: haggis Madras, neeps aloo sag and oatmeal chapatis. Rachel Murrell gets a taste for world cuisine, Glasgow-style
As self-censorship in US TV hardens, and the BBC reels from the aftermath of Jerry Springer: The Opera, Channel 4 will be expecting some flak for the high "fuck"-count in its newest comedy series Meet the Magoons.
Produced by IWC Media and shot on location in Hardgate, Glasgow, the series is about four Glaswegian Indians running a restaurant called The Spice. It is written and directed by Hardeep Singh Kohli, who also plays one of the four restaurateurs alongside Nitin Ganatra, Paul Sharma and his own brother, Sanjeev Kohli. The end- product is wacky, anarchic and profane: more Rab C Nesbitt than Tandoori Nights.
And it won't be just the anti-swearing lobby who will be standing by their phones. Hamish, the character played by Kohli himself, is a Sikh; he's feisty, opinionated and - apparently - gay. How does Kohli think this will play with the Sikh community? "I don't know and I don't care," says his creator. "I'm not trying to change race and politics in Britain. I'm just trying to make people laugh."
And that approach is characteristic of the show: comments about multi-cultural Britain are tangential rather than hitting the viewer over the head with a haggis samosa. One of the two brothers wears a turban and the other doesn't, but it's no big deal. The chef in the restaurant is white, but nobody comments on it. The racial abuse flows thick and fast, but the lads aren't victims of it: when they're not insulting the Chinese, they're insulting Indians.
The aim is to make the humour character-based, not issue-led. "I write about my own experience," says Kohli. "I don't wake up each morning saying 'what British Asian things will I do today?' any more than gay people wake up saying 'what gay things will I do today?'"
Kohli says the casual swearing in the script reflects Glasgow's lad culture. And he should know; he grew up there. He started out in the early 90s as a production trainee at BBC Scotland. The story goes that he...