Dame Meera Syal reflects on comedy, identity and a groundbreaking career

“Hurry up and kiss me, Gary! I’ve got to wake up!” Dame Meera Syal’s theatrical debut as Sleeping Beauty did little to predict her dazzling artistic career. In her wonderful new memoir, Vigilauntie, Syal details terrorising her nursery-school Prince Charming into a tearful stage exit. An inauspicious beginning for one of Britain’s most beloved entertainers, but it also introduced her to the laughter of an audience – “That sweet sound of people finding something I did funny. It was seductive, life-affirming and subversive.” Not unlike Syal herself.

To the casual observer, Dame Meera is firmly embedded in Britain’s establishment: so woven into our cultural fabric that her first novel, Anita and Me, is taught on the national curriculum. A phrase from Goodness Gracious Me, the ground-breaking 1990s BBC show she co-created, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary (“Kiss my chuddies”).

Then there is the litany of honours: DBE, CBE, MBE (or as her mother would have it, the MEB – “which as any Brummie knows is the Midlands Electricity Board”). But these achievements are testament more to Dame Meera’s talent and resolve than evidence of conformity; a recognition of how instrumental Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No 42 have been in blazing a trail for British Asian artists and fostering cultural understanding.

“People don’t want to hear a million political speeches,” she says, “but a well-timed joke or sketch can blow away stereotypes and preconceptions. You suddenly get to stand in someone else’s shoes and go, ‘Oh my God, is that how we behave in restaurants?’ It’s just holding a mirror up – but that’s the power of comedy, the power of storytelling.”

As the first Asian woman to receive a damehood for services to arts and culture, Syal was uneasy about the association with empire, but she accepted for her parents and the aunties who have been “the blowsy Greek chorus to my trials and successes… my inspiration and, occasionally, my conscience”.

She continues, “A lot of us immigrant kids were very aware of the sacrifices made to get us here. I can’t imagine the sort of upheaval [our parents] went through. Immigration is such a massive, dramatic thing.

"People don’t understand the emotional weight of leaving everyone you love and starting again in a country that often doesn’t want you there. That takes some grit, and it has a deep effect on you. So it’s like, ‘If [me getting a gong] makes you happy, Mum and Dad, I’m going to do it.’ You just want to see those shoulders go down, for them to go, OK, it was worth it. It was worth us coming here.”

The 65-year-old riffs freely on unbelonging, ambition and loss, criss-crossing seamlessly from the Punjab to Mellish Road Disco to the National Front to the Edinburgh Fringe to that most famous auntie of them all, the BBC. But it is the ubiquitous “Illuminaunties” she returns to again and again: the community glue, a displaced generation of women brimming with wisdom and gossip and “unmet needs and desires” – and the inspiration for chapters including Don’t Sit with Your Legs Apart and We Didn’t Get Any Therapy-Sherapy, We Just Got Hit with a Shoe.

“I wanted the book to feel like a chat with a mate over a cup of tea,” she explains. “That’s why often it goes off into tangents. I do hope that – particularly when women read the book – they see an arc of some kind. I am the most unlikely person to be doing what I’m doing: a little shabby brown girl from Wolverhampton. It just shows that everyone’s got a chance at breaking the glass ceiling or finding their potential.”

Vigilauntie is a funny, generous, inspiring book and its author’s faith in the alchemy of art and community shines through, even during the darker moments – such as when she writes, for the first time, about an assault she suffered as a young actor.

“I had a long think before I detailed these events because I really haven’t told anyone about it. But it came at quite a seminal point in my life where I could have given up, and actually it made me stronger, it made me seek out people that changed my life for the better in a big way. It was very therapeutic writing the book.

“The overwhelming feeling I came out with was gratitude. I’ve been so lucky. I know there have been horrible bits, but everybody gets horrible bits in their life, and the arc of it has been spectacularly interesting, even the bad bits. I’ve met amazing people, I’ve had amazing experiences, and I found love again. I’ve got amazing friends, and I have a wonderful family. I got to the end and just went, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

It’s a typically humble observation from the multi-award-winning actor, author, professor and BAFTA Fellow, auntie, rebel, dame – the woman who puts the gracious into Goodness Gracious Me (and the fear of God into Gary).

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