Radio / Goodness Gracious Me

(aka: Goodness Gracious Me)

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Regular characters included:

• Cheque Please - A tactless playboy who drives his dates away with insensitive behaviour or comments.
• Bhangra Muffins - Two "street" teenage boys with attitude.
• Everything Comes From India - A man who believes that everything from shampoo ^note :Actually semi-true; see The Other Wiki's page on the subject for details. to Superman is Indian ^note Except God, who clearly cannot be Indian as he works a six-day week, no Sundays, and Michaelangelo's David because no man with an organ that small could ever be Indian or was invented by Indians.
• Minx Twins - Gossipy teenage girls
• Chunky Lafanga - Bollywood superstar.
• Smeeta Smitten Showbiz Kitten - A Bollywood reporter whose presenting style leaves a lot to be desired.
• The Coopers - Snobbish nouveau riche couple in denial that they are Indian.
• Bhangra Man - A superhero who saves people through the power of bhangra dance.
• Guru Maharishi Yogi - A rather unflattering depiction of the famous guru, who likes to con money out of his followers.
• The Competitive Mothers: Mothers competing.

The best remembered sketch from the show, which has won several awards, was "Going for an English" - a parody of the behaviour of drunken Brits in Indian restaurants.

Tropes used in the show include:

• All Men Are Perverts: On the night before a young woman's wedding, her grandmother tries to give her advice about the wedding night, telling her that all men are insatiable and need sex every day - leading to talk about sex toys and far Too Much Information for the granddaughter's liking.
• Amusing Injuries: It is mentioned that Beena and her new boyfriend ended up in the emergency room after the string on his hoodie got caught in her belly button ring.
• Awful Wedded Life:
  • A parody of "I Know Him So Well" has an Indian woman discovering her new fiance is cheating on her with a white woman. At the end, the white woman sardonically reminds her that she'll be married to this man for about 50 years, leaving the Indian woman horrified at the prospect.
  • Another song involves a couple who meet at a party and decide to marry for love, to the disapproval of their respective families, who wanted them to have arranged marriages. They ultimately find married life unbearable, and are suggested to get divorced in short order.
  • A recurring sketch has a couple being interviewed about the difficulties in their marriage. They are apparently so bad at communication that they don't know each other's religious beliefs and don't realise the elderly "mother-in-law" living with them isn't actually related to either of them ... despite them having been married for at least 12 years.
• Berserk Button: Try suggesting that the Kapoors and Rabindranaths - er, Coopers and Robinsons - are anything but 100% English, and outrage is sure to result.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: One Smeeta Smitten sketch has her saying that after her career hit the skids she'd wound up a drug-addled, manic depressive alcoholic... so naturally she managed to easily get a job at the BBC.
• Black Comedy: Often invoked when dealing with serious topics such as racism, Honor-Related Abuse and sectarian violence.
• Blissfully Horrific Backstory: One recurring segment had an elderly Indian lady being interviewed about life under The Raj, and happily describing things like the well-kept gardens and the pretty uniforms of soldiers... while casually describing the horrific atrocities said soldiers were committing, to the obvious discomfort of the (white, British) interviewer.
  I remember travelling from Jaipur to Pune on the old Flyer. A ragtag bunch we were, old women chattering amongst themselves, small children dashing up and down the aisle... and as we pulled into the old hill station, a group of dashing young fusiliers from the local barracks came onto the platform and began to pepper our carriage with gunfire. And as the blood trickled down the aisle, I couldn't help noticing how brightly-polished their boots were. *wistful* Wonderful days.
• The B Grade: One of the options given in "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother" is fail an exam.
  • In one sketch, a father is absolutely outraged that his son got a B grade on a test. No matter how much his wife tries to defend their son, listing his other accomplishments (such as that he got all As in his A-levels, has been accepted to study medicine at Cambridge, and offered a trial to play professional football - all while only six years old) the father can only repeat that "My son got a B!"
• Boomerang Bigot: Part of the "Coopers" and "Robinsons" pretending to be middle class WASPs is gleefully embracing discrimination against Asian people. Which they aren't.
• Broken-Window Warning: The Coopers get a brick through their window from racist neighbours. They ignore the racist message written on it, and toss it in the bin with all the others.
• Catchphrase: "Kiss my chuddies!", "Cheque please!", "In your dreams, buddy!", "I can make it at home for nothing!", "Chaakde phaate!", "Yes, but how big is his danda?", etc.
• Captain Ethnic: The Punjabi super-hero BhangraMan, who defeats his foes through his amazing superpower of Indian folk dancing. BhangraMan is meant as a double parody, firstly of comic super-heroes in general, and secondly of the home-grown Indian variant such as Shaktimaan and Nagraj.
• Captain Geographic: The Punjabi superhero BhangraMan.
• Citizenship Marriage: Subverted in the song "Immigration." A British woman goes to Pakistan for a family wedding, and quickly falls in love and marries a local guy - but now can't bring him back to the UK to live with her, because the authorities insist he's a "passport case."
• Classically Trained Extra: One sketch has a woman auditioning for a part where she's playing a young woman shot dead by her pimp, being asked ahead of time if she can do a Scottish accent for the part. Her one "line" is a death rattle. Still, she manages to get the part.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: The Bhangra Muffins are often in their own world and unaware of what's actually going on around them - for example, mistakenly going to an opera performance instead of a recording of Oprah Winfrey's show.
• Cultural Posturing: Mr. Everything Comes From India, including the Renaissance masters and John Travolta.
• Culture Justifies Anything: Savagely lampooned in one sketch where an Indian woman runs into a women's shelter, screaming that her husband is chasing after her with a knife. The white woman running the shelter decides that this must be a "cultural" matter, and refuses to intervene - even when the husband breaks in.
• Discriminate and Switch:
  • A young Indian man nervously tries to come out as gay to his old-fashioned parents. As he expected, they're angry ... because he has a white boyfriend instead of "a nice Indian boy."
  • Two young women leaving a public toilet notice passers-by laughing at them, and assume it's because they are wearing saris. We then see that it's actually because their skirts are caught up in their underwear.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The first Bhangra Muffin sketch has them using a lot of phrases taken from the then-recent election of Tony Blair... applied to gangsta rap.
• Education Mama: Gender flipped in this sketch. The mother is very proud of her son's accomplishments while the father is enraged at his perceived shortcomings.
• Enemy Mine: In a parody of Teletubbies where three of the four characters represent different religious groups fighting for control of Kashmir. The fourth is a "hippy" who tries to tell them sectarian violence is wrong ... so the others finally agree on something ... and attack her.
• Euphemism Buster: The doorman at an ultra-posh tennis club tries to dance around the reason they won't admit the Coopers and Robinsons, before finally reaching breaking point. However, when they agree with the club's stated position, they're allowed in no fuss.
• Fauxreigner: One sketch was a parody of The Great Escape, where a group of Indian prisoners of war in WWII attempt to escape by posing as East Germans - "very East"
• Flanderization: A mild but distinct example with Mr Everything Comes From India. In his early sketches he'd set up the joke by mentioning things that actually are from India (e.g. the words "veranda" and "bungalow") before claiming things that definitely aren't (e.g. the phrase "mock Tudor mansion"). In later sketches he'd skip the first bit and go straight to claiming non-Indian things as Indian with absurd justifications.
• Fourth-Date Marriage: The song "Immigration" is about a woman unable to get a visa for her husband, whom she met and married while visiting family in Pakistan - suggesting the marriage was only a week or two after they met.
• Gag Dub: The "Skipinder the Punjabi Kangaroo" sketch.
• Gay Bar Reveal: In one sketch, the Bhangra Muffins go to a bar and try to order drinks underage, but decide to wear prescription glasses to make themselves look convincingly older. Since they don't actually need the glasses, they can't see a thing with them on, and are oblivious to the fact it's a gay bar - not ideal for their goal of trying to pick up girls.
• The Ghost: The Competitive Mothers' sons never appear, leaving it up in the air if anything the two claim about them is true even before they get into clearly absurd exaggerations.
• Guilt-Tripping: A young man's parents repeatedly pull this to try and stop him going out with his friends on Saturday night, telling him they're getting old and when they're dead he will regret not spending time with them. He eventually calls them out on being manipulative, and goes out anyway - only to get hit by a bus. His parents' reaction is to come outside and yell at him for being selfish enough to lie under a bus instead of staying at home with them.
• Happily Arranged Marriage: Comes up in a few sketches where parents who want to arrange a marriage for their child point out how happy they are in their own arranged marriage. In one of the songs, a couple who married for love against the wishes of their parents end up divorcing and conclude they would have been happier if they had just had an arranged marriage instead.
• Honor-Related Abuse: Referenced in a fictional advert for the fire-proof Asbestos Sari, which protects the wearer from "kitchen accidents" (often used as a thinly veiled excuse for honour killings.)
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • A traditional Muslim couple are horrified that their only son has converted to Judaism. The father reassures his distraught wife that they'll confront their son calmly. Then when their son enters he starts yelling at him. In a further example, the son says his parents should be happy that he's chosen to find fulfilment in religion rather than drugs and porn ... but admits the only reason he didn't was because they are related to all the local pharmacists and newsagents.
  • A woman applying for a job at the BBC chides the Asian Babe for being degrading and setting feminism back with her airheadedness. Then in her interview acts just as airheaded.
  • The Minx Twins argue because Beena got a new boyfriend and Meena is jealous. Meena makes many disparaging remarks about girls with boyfriends - only to instantly change her mind when Beena mentions she's arranged a double date for them with a friend of her boyfriend.
  • "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother" ends up happily resolved when the mother, who had previously objected to her son having a white girlfriend, discovers the girl is rich and allows them to marry so she can get her hands on some of the money.
• Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: Since Youtube didn't exist at the time, the Minx twins being humiliated in partaking in a Christmas show as sheep, while the lazy airheaded white girl who doesn't even know her lines plays Mary, is compounded by their family is in the audience filming them on camcorders.
• Just the Introduction to the Opposites: "Going Out for an English", about a group of drunk and rowdy Indian friends who visit an English restaurant, repeatedly mispronounce the waiter's strange foreign name (James) and show how macho they are by ordering "the blandest thing on the menu". This sketch is exceptional for the series in that it makes fun of a stereotype of white British, rather than British Asian, behaviour.
• Kick the Dog: Guru Yogi visits a housewife, and asks if she'd like to be a Hindu. She says she would, and he tells her "well, you can't."
• Large Ham: Chunky Lafanga is self-obsessed, over the top, and mugs for the camera at every opportunity. He turns every production he's in (from a Jane Austen-esque period drama to an Australian soap opera) into a Bollywood musical because he's incapable of performing as anyone other than himself.
• Magical Asian: Where Guru Maharishi Yogi teaching the secrets of Hinduism to a roomful of credulous white disciples is quite blatantly only in it for the money, and is feeding them profound-sounding nonsense to justify the "living expenses" they are paying him.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage:
  • A couple believe the harassment they are receiving is because one of them is Hindu and the other a Muslim ... only to discover neither of them is Hindu, leaving them confused.
  • The singer in "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother" has the problem that he wants to marry his white girlfriend but his mother disapproves. Luckily, she changes her tune by the end upon discovering the intended bride is wealthy.
• Marry for Love:
  • In the song "We Did It On Our Own", a couple decide to marry for love, against the wishes of their parents who wanted them to have arranged marriages. They end up divorcing and conclude that love wasn't enough to sustain the relationship.
  • The song "Hey Big Spinster" is about a woman in her thirties who is waiting to marry for love, despite facing cultural stigma for being single.
  • "Immigration", another song, features a woman who struggles to convince the UK Home Office that she married her husband (a Pakistani citizen) for love and not just to get him a British passport.
• Mermaid Problem: A variant in one of the Minx Twins sketches. Beena mentions that her new boyfriend is half Indian, and Meena asks if it's his top or bottom half. If it's the top half, he'll think she's a slut for trying to kiss him; and if it's the bottom half, he won't want to go any further than kissing.
• Moment Killer: A couple trying to say goodbye at a station are bothered by people trying to hawk their wares, even after being told to shove off.
• Momma's Boy: Often used as a source of humour. One sketch is the song "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Mother". Another has a couple trying to go to therapy over the man being one of these going wrong because the therapist is his mother. One of the things the Competitive Mothers compete over is how dependent their sons are on them.
• The Movie: Partition: The Motion Picture
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • One sketch revolves around a chartered accountant being approached by a client treated like it's Film Noir.
  • Part of the Six-Million Rupee Man's powers is being able to see things. Not, y'know, hidden things. Just things in plain view. He can also hold a small selection of household items in his arms.
• My Beloved Smother: A recurring joke is Asian mothers being extremely controlling, with the bickering mothers getting into an argument about it.
• My New Gift Is Lame: During one Christmas show, two gals sing about the things they'd like for Christmas, instead of what they'll actually get, which is shirts and MENSA memberships.
• Naturalized Name: Dennis and Charlotte Cooper (formerly Dinesh and Shashi Kapoor), and St John and Vanessa Robinson (formerly Surjit and Veena Rabindranath.) They, of course, deny having any ancestry but British.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: One sketch had a son of a Muslim family who turned Jewish, and who returns home sounding like Woody Allen.
• Noodle Implements: The mother who stubbornly insists she can make anything at home for free often rattles off a small list of things to do so, usually ending with a small aubergine. One sketch in the TV show ends with her about to do just that.
• Oh, Crap!: The Coopers and Robinsons are about to have a very British gin and tonic, until they notice the tonic water is Indian. They decided to change their drink order.
• Old People are Nonsexual: Parodied in a sketch where a grandmother tries to give her soon-to-be-married granddaughter advice about the wedding night, involving "vibrating eggs" and far more detail than the granddaughter wants to hear.
• Period Shaming: In a sketch about Indian advertising execs planning a tampon commercial. Through a combination of cultural stigma and general misogyny, the mostly-male creative team insists that the ad not even mention periods; while ignoring the suggestions of the women in the room. Ultimately, the ad features a woman with a paper bag over her head, wearing an abaya and a sign saying "UNCLEAN", while a voiceover vaguely describes the product as "the thing for that ... thing."
• Pizza Boy Special Delivery: Chunky Lafanga faces a scandal when it gets out that he starred in a "hardcore porn film" (which, since it's an Indian movie, is actually pretty tame) as a milkman being seduced by a housewife.
• Plain Palate: The 'Going for an English' sketch involves Asian people going to an English restaurant and ordering "the blandest thing on the menu" as a parody of the National Stereotype about Brits in Indian restaurants.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: One song on the show was a parody of "Common People" by Pulp. The singer accuses his white girlfriend of trying too hard to emulate Hindi culture because she thinks it's trendy.
• Questionable Casting: Invoked with the cast of "Partition: The Movie", where all the actors are clearly the wrong choice (Jim Carrey as Lord Mountbatten).
• Roadside Wave: In a parody of the then-current Mercedes Benz ads, the Robinsons lament being able to afford only one Mercedes, whereas their neighbours have seven "and a Jaguar for weekends." The Coopers then drive past, soaking the Robinsons with water from a puddle.
• Rule of Three: One episode has a marriage counsellor trying to reassure couples.
• The Scrooge: Another frequently used joke is Asians being insanely stingy.
• Sinister Minister: The show depicts Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a conman who scams credulous white people, and doesn't seem to know that much about his own religion.
• Sound-to-Screen Adaptation: Originally a series on BBC radio.
• Start My Own: When Smeeta Smitten is fired from the TV show she presents, she decides to create her own show and sell it to the network; and produces several attempted pilot episodes. None of them goes well.
• Stereotypical South Asian English: The series sends up White British perceptions of Asians, and sometimes the exaggerated accent is used to make a point concerning the ignorant British.
• Stereotype Flip:
  • One sketch flips the stereotype of obnoxious Brits making fools of themselves at Indian restaurants with a bunch of Indians who decide to "go for an English".
  • The first sketch on the TV show has one white guy having to deal with his all-Indian employers not getting his name, constantly mispronouncing it despite his efforts to help them along.
  • A sketch in the Christmas special has a young man telling his mum and dad he doesn't want to be a pop star, like all his cousins. He wants to be a doctor! And he's never been gay.
  • Later on, there's a woman interviewing three 'teenagers' who are harassed by their friends because they're... middle class. They don't even know how to say "innit", bruv.
  • An ambiguous/debatable one regarding the aforementioned sketch about the son who comes out as gay and has a White partner, for two reasons:
    • The fact that it is the non-white family who object to the interracial relationship arguably could be said to be an inversion of the real-life tendency in itself.
    • While the stigma against interracial relationships certainly does exist among some Indians, nevertheless homosexuality would cause a lot more consternation among many if not most Indians than interracial romance (with a White partner at least - a Black partner might well be another matter indeed).
• Subverted Kids' Show:
  • "Skipinder the Punjabi Kangaroo" portrays the kangaroo as a foul-mouthed, perverted alcoholic.
  • A parody of Play School involves the presenters explaining that Jemima converted to Islam to marry Humpty, who didn't marry his previous girlfriend (Hamble) because her parents couldn't afford a big enough dowry, and now she's not sure if he or Big Ted is the father of her child.
  • A parody of Teletubbies where the characters represent different groups fighting for control of Kashmir, apart from "Hippy Jo" who tries to encourage them to get along, so the others violently attack her.
  • A parody of The Sooty Show opens with Sooty having died and Soo, apparently his wife, trying to convince the others that she shouldn't be burned alive on his funeral pyre (sati.) She ultimately says that they weren't even married - so Sweep orders her to be stoned for adultery instead.
• Take That!: "The Blacked Up Men" aimed entirely at blackface.
• Titled After the Song: "Goodness Gracious Me" was originally a comic song by Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, in which Sellers (who was white) played a heavily-accented Indian doctor and Loren his patient, who was in love with him. According to Word of God, the Goodness Gracious Me team originally intended to do a much more aggressive sketch attacking the song, until they listened to the lyrics and realised that, despite the stereotypical fake accent, Sellers' character was actually quite positively portrayed and the song wasn't racist in its humour.
• Token White: The show had Dave Lamb in the cast to play the Token White Man, who was cast in role-reversal situations where he represented the equivalent of an Indian or Pakistani, who is alone among white people in an unfamiliar culture. This was used to Lampshade white British attitudes towards Asians, ranging from well-meaning ineptitude to outright racism. ^note Dave is better known as the mega-snarky narrator of foodie show Come Dine With Me.
• Truth in Television: The cast based some of the characters on the show on people they knew and didn't exaggerate when portraying them, offending those people greatly while doing it.
• The Unintelligible: Bhangra Man speaks only in Punjabi but is always perfectly understood by English-speaking characters.
• Very False Advertising: A promotion on a home shopping channel for a range of skin-lightening creams, which the presenter demonstrates on a woman with "unfashionably" dark skin ... instantly turning her into a white woman that the target audience are expected to believe is the same actress.
• We Can Rebuild Him: The origin of the Six-Million Rupee Man, a rickshaw pilot caught in a tragic accident.
  Narrator: We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We may not have the best exchange rate...
• The Whitest Black Guy:
  • The Coopers and Robinsons are in complete denial that they're Asian, and their lives revolve around trying to look and act as much like middle-class WASPs as possible.
  • In one of the Minx Twins sketches, Beena announces she's dating a boy called Michael. Meena makes fun of her for having a white boyfriend, but when Beena reveals that he's biracial white and Indian, Meena ponders on what this means as to how "Indian" he's going to be in the relationship.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The "Marriage Emporium" sketch is one to Monty Python's "Cheese Shop Sketch" (with a bit of the Dead Parrot thrown in at the end).