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The world according to Romesh
Guy Kelly chats to the maths-teacher-turned-comedian
Romesh Ranganathan can’t help but feel sorry for his grandchildren. Not that he has any (his three sons, Theo, Alex and Charlie, are only 10, eight and five), but one day he might, and ‘they’re going to have to endure endless, endless stories about what happened when we were all in lockdown’.
‘It’ll be awful. All…’ – he puts on an oldman voice – ‘“Ohhhh, you lot don’t know you’re born! We all had to stay indoors, for months at a time!” I genuinely pity them.’
The moan is typical of Ranganathan’s comedy: couched in the domestic, innately misanthropic, and yet with a stealthy hint of optimism. It’s easy to see why that combination is just as successful with TV commissioners as with stand-up audiences. If you haven’t seen him on stage, you’ll have seen him on multiple panel shows, including A League of Their Own, hosting the Royal
Variety Performance, or on his much-loved travel and documentary series.
We meet virtually. I am at home in south London; Ranganathan is at home in Crawley, West Sussex. Specifically, he is in the brightblue, Pokémon-stuffed bedroom occupied by his middle son, Alex. Clear-rimmed glasses divide a haircut and a beard that are beginning to mirror one another in unruliness.
So, what will Ranganathan be able to say he did during the pandemic of 2020? Quite a lot. Since his breakthrough seven years ago, the 42-year-old has accumulated such an absurdly full portfolio of commitments – stand-up tours, including a solo debut that shifted over 100,000 tickets; Bafta-nominated documentaries; a sitcom; newspaper columns – that he’d be forgiven for taking a rare opportunity to rest. But despite describing himself as ‘a lazy s—t’, he is as busy as ever.
When his latest tour was thwarted midrun, he started hosting Facebook Live sessions from Alex’s bedroom, chatting about nothing in particular. Sometimes his wife of a decade, Leesa, joins him to offer her side of ramblings about everything from exercise regimes (they work out together in the morning) to her name (her parents chose the phonetic spelling from a John le Carré novel). Occasionally his mother, Shanthi – who has her own fans, thanks to several appearances on his shows – pops up.
‘Leesa kept passing in the background in her dressing gown, so I thought it’d be nice if she did some, but she doesn’t like attention,’ he says. ‘She is the opposite of my mother in that regard…’
Ranganathan also has two current TV projects: the second series of Sky’s Rob & Romesh Vs, in which he and fellow comic Rob Beckett travel the world immersing themselves in various pursuits they don’t really understand (this time ballet, basketball, cricket); and the return of the BBC’S The Ranganation, which drew an average of 1.2 million viewers last year. A sort of comedy ‘discussion’ show that takes on topical issues, it’s recorded only a couple of days before transmission, and has a diverse ‘focus group’ of outspoken members of the public, and his mother, in the studio. This time round it will be produced virtually, but anchored from his house.
‘Mmm, we’re still sort of working that one out,’ Ranganathan says. ‘Some blokes have been in my garage all week, fitting it out as a studio.’
Is he nervous about beginning a topical comedy programme in these uneasy times? ‘I don’t think there’s anything you can’t joke about, but you have to figure out the line,’ he says. ‘Before this [lockdown] started, I was on stage making some jokes about coronavirus as if it wasn’t a big deal, and there’s no way I’d make those now.’
Jokes about domestic frustrations during lockdown are perhaps safest of all. ‘If you’re on lockdown and you’re struggling, you’re looking to comedy to make light of the situation – it’s a particularly British thing. It’s therapeutic to have people go through the exact same things as you.’
Ranganathan is better placed than most celebrities to provide commentary about ‘normal’ life under lockdown. Crawley is a very normal town. (In fact, his acclaimed autobiography is called Straight Outta Crawley: Memoirs of a Distinctly Average
Human Being.) His home is 10 minutes away from his mother’s and only 15 from where he grew up. And he has three young children who are as sick of being homeschooled as their parents are of homeschooling them.
‘I just think, “Does it really matter if they’re just a bit thicker at the end of this? They’ll recover…” Though we did have one of those evenings on Zoom with another couple recently, and started to feel paranoid about what we were doing with our kids when they were telling us about theirs.’
Before comedy, Ranganathan was a maths teacher, and Leesa is still a supply drama teacher, but their experience hasn’t made things much easier.
‘I was helping our eldest with some maths the other day and he just wasn’t reading the question properly, so I started throwing in some of my old teacher phrases, like, “You understand the work, but you’re letting yourself down by not reading the question.” It’s bad enough hearing those phrases, but from your dad? Awful.
‘You can’t expect them to do a full school day – and we don’t want to teach a full school day. So we do a morning, then let them play Fortnite. But we are close to rebellion. If we can’t control them with a staff ratio of two teachers to three kids, I don’t know how teachers do it – and we’ve actually been teachers,’ he says.
Compared to their father, Ranganathan’s sons have had a remarkably settled start to life. His parents, Ranga, an accountant and ‘Del Boy’ figure, and Shanthi, met in their native Sri Lanka but moved to the UK in the mid-1970s.
Ranganathan is the elder of their two sons, and was given the first name Jonathan – Romesh is his middle name – in case using it one day helped him to get jobs. (‘The very idea of it makes me want to change my name to “Romesh P—i Whiteykiller” and see how things go,’ he wrote in his book.)
They lived in a nice semi-detached house, and Romesh and his brother, Dinesh, were sent to private school, where they were two of only a few British Asian pupils.
‘We were in the lowest bracket of income there, and everyone thought Crawley was a sort of working-class s—thole,’ he says.
Then, around the age of 11, as Ranganathan casually puts it, ‘everything went tits up,
‘No comedy club is as tough as Year 9 maths, last lesson on a Friday’
really quickly’. First, Ranga’s business fell on hard times, resulting in the house being repossessed, the boys being transferred to a local comprehensive and the family moving to a council-funded bed and breakfast, due to a lack of available council housing. Ranga was discovered to have been unfaithful to Shanthi, and temporarily moved in with his new lover. He then became involved in dodgy enterprises that saw him convicted of fraud and sent to Ford open prison for two years.
‘It felt like the whole world was falling apart,’ Ranganathan says. ‘It was hellish, at the time anyway. You go from a position that’s settled, with happily married parents, everyone comfortable, then that’s taken away.’
He particularly remembers the ignominy of living in a B&B, where the family would eat ungodly numbers of cheese sandwiches to save money while his mother struggled with multiple low-wage jobs. He would hear her cry herself to sleep.
Once, he was being driven home from his new school by another boy’s mother, and rather than let her drop him off at the B&B, picked a totally random, nice house nearby, then walked up the drive as if it was his.
‘It was like a scene from Only Fools and Horses. She kept saying she’d wait until I got inside so I had to say, “I usually slip round the back…” I thought I might have to break in.’ His retelling of the saga is filled with laughter, but that time affected him profoundly.
Ranga and Shanthi rekindled their relationship after he left prison. But Ranganathan, a teenager, simmered with frustration. ‘I went off the rails. Bunked and missed classes. Smoked a lot of weed. I’d been through that level of trauma, I just didn’t care for my long-term goals. I was a bit of a t—t.’
He snapped out of it after starting a maths degree at the University of London’s Birkbeck college (which he followed with a master’s in economics). At that time Dinesh, two years younger, started messing around too.
‘I remember trying to sort him out and realising, we’re at risk of not making the most of our opportunities, so I’d better put some work in.’
It was also at Birkbeck that he first started therapy, which he has ‘dipped in and out’ of ever since. He is now an ambassador for the mental-health charity Calm.
After graduation, there was a brief, unhappy stint working for a catering company at Gatwick Airport, before Ranganathan applied to become a teacher. Eager to stay local, he found a job at his old comprehensive, Hazelwick School, teaching maths. It was there he met Leesa (‘Miss Maynard’). It took him a while to approach her, principally because she was a drama teacher and he was ‘prejudiced against those barefoot “call me by my first name” freaks.’ They got
together, managing to keep their relationship a secret from the students.
He’s always loved teaching. ‘What it has in common with stand-up is that you never really master it. You can think it’s getting easy, then a Year 11 class will give you an hour of hell and make you question everything,’ he says. ‘I can tell you that working the room in any comedy club is not as tough as teaching a Year 9 class maths, last lesson on a Friday.’
His first experience of those comedy clubs didn’t come until he was 31. ‘I got hooked, so started doing comedy in the evening after teaching. Unfortunately the kids I was teaching got wind of it and came along. It’s very difficult to command respect in a classroom when those kids have seen you die on your arse the night before.’
Ranganathan’s talent for an instantly wellcrafted story and quip likely comes from his parents. Shanthi – as anyone who has seen her contributions to his BBC travel series Asian Provocateur , or The Ranganation, will know – has a gift for a dry put-down.
Ranga was a natural performer, too, and was so fond of entertaining that he bought a pub in East Grinstead when the boys were older. He died, suddenly, of a heart attack in 2011, and for a few months Romesh and Dinesh tried to keep the pub going. Their experiences later inspired Ranganathan’s Sky sitcom, The Reluctant Landlord.
He maintains he wasn’t at all good at stand-up in the early days, and still feels in debt to Leesa for encouraging him to stick with it, even when she had to breastfeed their first son in the car while he performed for next to nothing. Those early gigs, often in pubs, saw him run the usual gauntlet of wellhydrated hecklers. Many were racist.
‘Loads of that. Getting called a terrorist before I’d even started my set,’ all sorts. ‘Doesn’t happen any more really. It takes an impressively committed racist to pay £20 to shout abuse at someone.’
He learned fast on the circuit, and decided to quit teaching and go full-time in comedy. ‘I truly don’t think I would have ever become a comic if all that stuff hadn’t happened [in his childhood]. It made me follow a more unorthodox lifestyle. My parents came over here partly to give us a proper education, but all that made me realise [life] isn’t all about chasing money and a nice house and all of that s—t. So I thought, “I’ll give anything a go.”’
In 2013, four years after his first gig, he was nominated for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Later that year he appeared on Live at the Apollo ;by2015hewas at the Royal Variety Performance; in 2019, he returned to co-host – even suggesting to the watching Duke and Duchess of Cambridge that they probably regret having three children sometimes, like he does. (They laughed.) He has also performed for the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and their staff at Clarence House. Good crowd?
‘Er, yeah. Charles and Camilla were sat at the front and laughed at everything. But I did feel the rest of the audience were waiting to see if they laughed before they felt comfortable to [do so] themselves.’
Performing for the royals has been among his surreal, ‘How did I end up here?’ moments. It was also a major source of pride for Shanthi, who, despite her fans and Ranganathan offering to pay her wages, still works the odd Saturday shift in the local post office.
He plans on slowing down a little now. He wants to continue to make travel programmes, and even has a small part as a footman in James Corden’s upcoming bigscreen adaptation of Cinderella.
Otherwise, he intends to be at home more and focus on his own projects, rather than simply appearing on everything. Maybe he’s thinking of his legacy. Maybe he’s thinking of those grandchildren.
‘You know, I’m sort of worried I’ve become That Dick [who’s on everything], so I’m going to try and avoid that,’ he says, with a broad smile. He catches himself; the face goes limp again. ‘And yes, I appreciate a lot of people will think that ship has sailed.’ The Ranganation is on BBC Two on Sundays at 9.15pm; Rob & Romesh Vs continues on Sky One and Now TV on Tuesday at 9pm