‘No stand-up does it not to be famous’
WITH TV ROLES AND A NEW TOUR, LOCKDOWN HAD ITS UPSIDES FOR COMEDIAN SINDHU VEE, SHE TELLS
BUT you haven’t told me how you’re doing,’ says Sindhu Vee as we wrap up our chat. Now, this is unusual in an interview, not only because you have an allotted time and don’t want to waste it talking about yourself but also because, you know, celebrities, busy people… busy and often fairly self-involved people.
It’s even funnier coming from stand-up Sindhu, much of whose routine seems to be about how hardcore she is, especially when it comes to her children.
‘Being Indian, I don’t have those hang-ups where parents do all the work and the children just lie around,’ she says from a fairly messy study in her family home.
‘They realise it’s different from their friends but during ring lockdown they were trapped in this f***ing house...’ And she shrugs and laughs.
She is reminiscing about how her lockdown actually had its benefits. Quality time with welltrained children – and with a well-trained husband – being just two of them.
‘I’ve never spent this much time with my spouse in my life,’ she says of the Danish financier she met while at university, ‘and it was clear it could go one of two ways… One being I will 100 per cent get divorced. But I appreciated how he manages my demanding-ness… He’s learned how because he has a strong survival instinct.’ She says it with a smirk.
Another thing she can thank lockdown for is a new strand to her career: acting – both as a bored housewife in Rose Matafeo’s
Starstruck and as an addict in
Mae Martin’s Feel Good.
‘That definitely came out of lockdown,’ she says. ‘I know Mae and I know Rose, so when they asked me to read for these parts it wasn’t like going in cold. I’d read for a small part in The Crown and this wasn’t like that. And on set everyone was very conscious of the fact I hadn’t acted and they were also comedians so there was a lot of support…’
It also inspired Sindhu to write her own project, which is now being considered at various channels.
‘There are so many characters in my stand-up that it wasn’t difficult to make that into a story,’ she says. Adding that this seems to be a specifically female extension to stand-up, the comedy drama, with not only the shows she’s been in and written but others by the likes of Roisin Conaty, Katherine Ryan and Aisling Bea.
Having studied at Oxford and in Canada, the journey from successful banker to stand-up comedian seems a strange one. But because she’d excelled academically, her parents left her alone, even if ‘they just thought stand-up was a hobby that was getting out of control’. ‘They were very concerned that I wasn’t getting married in my twenties but that sorted itself out,’ she says. ‘As soon as I had kids, they were like, “Phew!”’
She also didn’t feel she had to apologise for having a successful career when she joined other jobbing stand-ups at late-night comedy clubs. ‘I’ve never taken a penny from my parents and I don’t go around saying, “You have to accept I was a banker because before that I was poor,” because that’s a very English thing.
‘I know how I got to where I got. And I never wanted to be a banker anyway, I wanted to be a professor.’
With much of her comedy centred on Indian stereotypes – the controlling parents especially – you wonder if British Indians ever get annoyed with her for perpetuating them. Apparently not. ‘They laugh and then they say, “Oh, God, that’s so true,”’ she says. Now as an Indian woman with British children, Sindhu admits it’s been tough. Even if she says it with a smirk. ‘I have never really wanted my kids to feel like they’re not from here, but I haven’t wanted them to have some of the behaviours of British kids,’ she continues. ‘Like answering me back.’
Her husband, being Danish, if we’re going to run with stereotypes, has the opposite attitude to child-rearing and is very laissez-faire, which Sindhu finds ridiculous.
‘I said to my mother, if I ever leave my husband, it’ll be over raising the kids. According to him, everything they do is great. But it’s not great to be in the B team at football. It’s s**t.’
When it comes to the new show, Alphabet, touring from September, it may only be her second nationwide tour, but she’s not nervous.
‘I’m always grateful for an audience and delighted they’ve come out and I’m dying to tell them this stuff,’ she goes on to admit.
‘No stand-up does it not to be famous, I don’t care what anyone says, so having an audience is a good thing.’
Mention that she’s glamorous – and she is: the hair, the beautiful silk wrap dresses – and she’ll tell you it’s the best thing you can possibly do.
‘Oh, thank you. I love that. I’m inordinately vain and shallow,’ she says. With another smirk.
‘There are so many characters in my stand-up it wasn’t difficult to make that into a story [for TV]’