Hanif Kureishi adapts his own novel as four funny, frank and crowded hours, with Roshan Seth and Brenda Blethyn giving the best performances in it. Too long for a story this quick, but we would rather have too much of this than too little.
Hanif Kureishi adapts his own novel for television as four hour-long episodes, with Roger Michell directing, first broadcast on 3 November 1993. The set-up is a good joke told straight. Haroon Amir (Roshan Seth), a middle-aged clerk from Bombay living in a south London semi, starts lecturing the neighbours on Eastern wisdom from a cushion in Eva Kay’s front room, and discovers that being exotic in the suburbs pays better than being ordinary ever did. His son Karim (Naveen Andrews) watches it happen. The series is about what Karim does with what he sees, and it is sharper, sadder and ruder than its reputation as a period comedy suggests.
Seth is the reason the first episode works. He plays Haroon not as a fraud but as a man who has found, late, a thing people want from him, and who cannot quite believe his luck. The front-room scene, with commuters’ wives in kaftans copying his breathing while Eva (Susan Fleetwood) looks on like a woman who has bought a racehorse, is the funniest thing here. We laughed, and then we caught sight of Blethyn’s Margaret at home in her cardigan, hearing her husband described as a holy man by women who have never addressed her by name, and felt ashamed of laughing. Blethyn does almost all of it with her shoulders and the set of her mouth. It moved us more than we were prepared for in a comedy about yoga in Beckenham-adjacent living rooms, and it is the best piece of acting in the series.
Andrews has the harder job. Karim is a watcher, the kind of narrator a novel can carry and a camera cannot, and there are stretches where the series waits for him to want something and he simply grins. That grin is charming, and Andrews is good at the particular rudeness of a clever boy who has not yet been hurt, but the people around him are more vivid than he is. We noticed it most in the second half, when he is given a career and a love affair and seems to be present at both rather than in them.
Alexandra Byrne’s costumes do a lot of the storytelling the script is too busy for. Charlie (Steven Mackintosh) first appears as a schoolboy Bowie, bolt across the face, scarf and all, while Bowie’s own score plays underneath him, and Michell has the sense not to point at the joke. The score itself is mostly texture, synthesiser washes and guitar under the dialogue, with the title song over the credits the one place Bowie steps forward. It is the best song attached to a television title sequence we can think of, and Michell is right to let it run.
The second half leaves the suburbs for theatre, and the series gets cleverer and colder at the same time. David Bamber’s Shadwell, a fringe director who wants Karim to be more Indian for the audience’s benefit, is a precise and nasty portrait, and Jemma Redgrave’s Eleanor brings a class of English guilt the suburbs never produced. We admired these episodes and missed the earlier ones. The warmest writing in the back half goes to Changez (Harish Patel), who arrives from India to marry Jamila (Nisha Nayar) and turns out to be nothing anyone expected; Patel plays him with a dignity the script keeps testing.
The real flaw is the arithmetic. Four hours sounds generous and is not, because Kureishi is trying to carry the whole book, and so years go by in a cut and relationships are declared rather than shown. There are moments when a scene ends while we are still arriving in it.
The few reviews we have read split sharply, and their average sits well below where we are. One finds the series bland and lethargic, and we think it has mistaken a mild narrator for a mild programme. Nothing around Karim is mild. The 18 certificate is earned, several times and without apology; this is frank about sex in a way British television has grown more careful about since. Watch it across two nights, because four hours of other people’s seventies in one sitting is a lot, and because Seth and Blethyn deserve a fresh audience for every episode they are in.
