#104 - Dame Meera Syal copertina

#104 - Dame Meera Syal

#104 - Dame Meera Syal

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Twiggy is back, and she has brought a Dame with her. After more than a year away, Twiggy explains where she went: Sadie Frost's documentary about her life took her round Britain and Europe from film festival to film festival for most of last year. The nice twist is that the film only exists because of this podcast. Twiggy had Sadie on to talk about her Mary Quant film, asked what she wanted to make next, and Sadie said she was after someone with a connection to the sixties. The answer was sitting across the table. Her first guest back is the writer, actor, comedian and singer Dame Meera Syal, who Twiggy has known since Meera played Leigh Lawson's secretary in Kinsey at the start of the nineties. What follows is two women comparing notes on the same unlikely life. Neither looked like anybody already doing the job. Neither had a single connection. Both got in anyway, and both have spent the years since telling the people coming behind them that the not-fitting-in was the point. In this episode: Being made a Dame: Meera passes on the message she got from another Dame, which was, roughly, that it means very little and she should enjoy every second of it. Twiggy admits she forgets about it half the time and that official letters keep addressing her as Dame Lawson. Essington: a mining village in South Staffordshire, halfway between Cannock and Willenhall, and a two up two down with the loo outside. Baths in front of the fire. A childhood spent out of the house from morning until dark, which Meera argues built the resilience and the appetite for risk that the generation after hers was never given room for. New Delhi, 1960: her parents arrived as what Meera calls a terrible mixture of ambitious, talented and poor. Her father's family lost everything in the partition of India in 1947 and he was in a refugee camp at thirteen. Her mother was recruited as a teacher in India by the British Department of Education and got the job offer first. Her father came by ship and spent a fortnight with his head down the toilet. Who Do You Think You Are: Meera found out that her mother's father had been arrested, imprisoned and tortured for fifteen months by the British authorities after joining a peaceful march for the freedom to worship. Her mother had never heard the story. Twiggy's own episode took her back to a great-great-grandmother left with six children and no money, who ended up in the workhouse. Mr Cartwright: the Spanish teacher who ran the guitar group with his cigarette wedged in the fret, was not supposed to be smoking in school, and did not care. He was the only teacher who asked Meera how she felt rather than how her grades were. He told her that if she chose the thing she was good at it would not feel like work, that her parents would come to understand, that he would back her up, and that she would be sad for the rest of her life if she never tried. The diary that became a career: Meera started writing as a teenager because of the confusion of a bicultural life, one person inside the house and another outside it, swapping accents like masks. She recommends journaling to anybody who wants to write, on the grounds that it teaches you your own voice. Goodness Gracious Me and the Kumars: the observations she used to laugh at on her own, entirely unaccompanied, became sketches. Sanjeev Bhaskar's brief for the granny was that she should be a hand grenade in the family, because nobody expects the old Indian lady to be the most radical person in the room. Meera describes what she got away with as that character, including staying in a hug with Tom Jones for a very long time to see what he would do. Anita and Me: her first novel, closely based on the Essington childhood. The designers worked from photographs of her actual family home and recreated the wallpaper, the carpet and the fake leather sofa. A number one single: the Kumars with Gareth Gates for Comic Relief. There is a gold disc on the wall, and they got to perform on Top of the Pops, which had been on Meera's bucket list long before the show ended. Twiggy had been on it twice: once as a teenage mod, tapped on the shoulder at a dance hall to go and dance on the show, and later as a solo singer, when the rule was that groups could mime and solo artists had to sing live. Bhaji on the Beach: her first film as a screenwriter, made with Gurinder Chadha, about a coachload of Indian women on a day trip to Blackpool. She wanted it because there had never been a drama about South Asian women in Britain, because the few roles that existed had been written from the outside, and because the collision of saris and kiss me quick hats was the truth of her childhood. Why she writes: Meera makes the case that one good story does more than a hundred political speeches, because a story invites you to stand in somebody else's shoes and then hands the invitation back. Vigilauntie: Twiggy gets the title days after Meera finished the manuscript. It is a memoir built around what ...
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