Sanjeev Bhaskar

Sanjeev Bhaskar was born in Ealing in 1963. His father arrived in Britain in 1956, followed by his mother in 1960, after their displacement in the wake of partition. His father ran a laundrette in Hounslow and the family lived above the business. He was educated at Cranford Community College and then studied business with marketing at Hatfield Polytechnic. Before starting to act he worked in marketing, including for IBM. During his studies he met musician Nitin Sawhney and together they created the Secret Asians, a comedy double act, which received wider public attention and led to them being approached by BBC producer Anil Gupta and then to their involvement with the comedy sketch series Goodness Gracious Me. In the mid-1990s, Bhaskar had started working for Tara Arts as an actor. The great success of Goodness Gracious Me led Bhaskar to star in a wide range of film and television programmes. He followed Goodness Gracious Me with The Kumars at No. 42, which ran for seven seasons between 2001 and 2006. He also starred in the film adaptation of Meera Syal’s Anita and Me and the television adaptation of Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, also based on her novel. From 2010 to 2013 he starred as Dr Prem Sharma in the BBC series The Indian Doctor, charting the life of an Indian GP and his wife in a rural Welsh mining village in the 1950s and 1960s.

He met Meera Syal in 1996 while making Goodness Gracious Me. They have been married since 2005. Bhaskar has also acted on stage, notably as King Arthur in the Monty Python musical Spamalot. In 2009 he was appointed Chancellor of the University of Sussex.