Play

There was something special about Goodness Gracious Me. Immigrants had featured on British television (think Mind Your Language) and through the 1980s you could see more diversity turn up on the small screen, but GGM still managed to pull of the still rare feat of making the English and not the "outsiders" the butt of the joke. There's no better reminder of this than the the show’s most celebrated sketch, “Going for an English” in which the show's desi cast parody the way British people act in an Indian restaurant which was voted the sixth greatest comedy sketch in a 2008 Channel 4 poll. Featuring characters played by Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Syal, and Nina Wadia, the show initially started as a series on Radio 4 before turning up on BBC Two between 1996 and 2001.

Now Goodness Gracious Me is back. After reuniting last year for the 50th anniversary celebrations of BBC Two, Syal and gang have put together another special for the BBC's India season, including sketched making fun of the British Broadcasting Corporation itself and another one called 'Brownton Abbey.'

That aired this week in the United Kingdom, working as a great reminder that all of the show's best sketches are available online, making it easy to dip into the wealth of subversive immigrant comedy that GGM was best at.

Play

From popularising the Indian slang that would make its way into British English to making fun of the kinds of behaviour that you will find in most desi homes in Britain, Goodness Gracious Me didn't make fun of immigrants from a white point of view. Instead, the humour came from the immigrant experience and was often aimed at British culture rather than the other way around.

Play

That said, it never hesitated to mock those bits of immigrant culture that were just asking to be made fun of as in this sketch, where Sanjeev Bhaskar tries convincing his son that the Mona Lisa was painted by an Indian.

Play

Competition between Asian couples attempting to be more English than each other was a common source of humour as was a British update on classic tropes, like desi aunties boasting about their sons – except this time using the boys' sexual prowess as fodder to brag about.

Play