Star who plays Navid reveals he’s the new ‘poster boy for gout’

STILL Game star Sanjeev Kohli claims good-living and too many KFC takeaways left him floored… with gout. Sanjeev, 46, who plays Asian shopkeeper Navid in the sitcom, went to his GP with a pain in his knee but a scan showed he had gout. He said: “I’m the poster boy for gout. “My missus said don’t tell people because they are going to think you are living like Henry VIII.” Gout was once linked to a rich diet and King Henry was a famous sufferer. Sanjeev added: “I’m really tight. My usual life is crisps for dinner. Maybe that’s what caused it. “But I do love all foods. I’m addicted to curry, especially mum’s, and I’m addicted to KFC. “You know how Chris Hoy has the velodrome in Glasgow? The KFC in Bishopbriggs should be named after me.” Sanjeev, who also plays BY JOHN DINGWALL “AJ” Jandhu in BBC soap River City, has kept himself busy, despite the gout. He hosted the Scottish Music Awards at Glasgow’s SEC at the weekend.

He said: “Medication is helping and I am already feeling better. It is not graceful at all because you end up walking about like the Billy Connolly parking attendant.”

He is also in the film Stan & Ollie, about the comedy legends Laurel and Hardy’s UK visit. He said: “I’m only in it for one scene. I play the manager of the Glasgow Empire.

“You could argue he’d never be an Asian guy.

“But they cast me and I wasn’t going to talk myself out of that job.”

Meanwhile, the ninth and final series of Still Game, starring Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill as OAPs Jack and Victor, screens in February on the new BBC Scotland channel.

A live show, The Final Farewell, will be staged in September. But Sanjeev says the show will “never die”.

He said: “When we stopped it last time and didn’t do it for five years because the boys fell out, we didn’t feel it went away.

“I still had people on building sites shouting, ‘Where’s [his Still Game wife] Meena?’

“It will be on Netflix ad infinitum so Still Game will live on.”