Interview: Rarely Asked Questions - Anuvab Pal

The British Empire gave Indian stand-up Anuvab Pal a colonial accent and British values and suddenly left.

This week there was the last of two special episodes on BBC Radio 4 that were recorded in India (a documentary about the India episodes is on Radio 4 at 11.30 on Monday 2nd April), featuring regulars Nicholas Parsons and Paul Merton, English comedian Marcus Brigstocke, and Indian comedians Cyrus Broacha and Anuvab Pal. Topics for discussion included "It's just not cricket" and "Mumbai traffic".

The main difference between this and the normal British edition is that the Indians appear to be much more competitive. Although there are those who will like the faster-paced action, there are those, including myself, that feel it disturbs the flow too much with so many challenges. Still, it makes for an interesting change...

Forty-five years after its invention, Just a Minute is taking its singular mix of the clever and the silly to India for two shows. The location, the Mumbai Comedy Store, changed the whole feel of the programme. Over here, it tends to take place in halls, where the laughter echoes; in the Comedy Store, the audience sounded like it was almost on top of the performers (Paul Merton and Marcus Brigstocke plus domestic talent Anuvab Pal and Cyrus Broacha), in what felt like a bearpit.

The Indians, in a sense, are ahead of us. Just a Minute took off there when it was on the BBC World Service, and it's played by young Indian professionals at "JaM sessions". This gave Pal and Broacha a leg-up as far as the rules were concerned, though neither could quite get the hang of the "repetition" bit.

The subjects were well chosen - they included "cultural exchanges" and "colonial India" - which elicited the following from Pal: "General Malcolm Muggeridge of the 1st Jaipur Infantry liked to wear his breeches and go for deep swims." There followed a long, smutty riff from the assembled cast about what "deep swims" might be a euphemism for - suggesting that the cultural divide between ourselves and our former subjects isn't very wide at all.