STILL GAME star Sanjeev Kohli played to sold out audiences at 21 shows at The Hydro and now the Glaswegian comedian is considering taking his talents into stand up. Kohli, who plays popular local shopkeeper Navid in the show, first tried his hand at stand up comedy back in 1998. However, despite going on to do writing and acting, he never returned to the mic. That is until a recent preview of an Edinburgh Fringe show, Immigrant Diaries, played at The Stand Comedy Club, Glasgow.

"I shied away from stand up because I think it's one of the hardest things you can do. I'd always been slightly scared of doing it", said Kohli, "Lots of people have said to me to do stand up, others have said, ‘Why are you bothering? People do stand up to get to where you are now’.

"But I never saw it as a career thing, I just saw it as, in my business, you don’t have a lot of control over your career – sometimes you’re waiting for the phone to ring. But if you're a stand up and you're writing all the time, then you could maybe start up a tour, phone up a venue, have some sort of control over your career. As it was, four years ago I was waiting for the phone to ring and it didn't ring".

After a 17 year break from stand up, Kohli was reflective after the show and admitted he had considered performing solo on previous occasions. "Stand up was always what I thought would be the logical conclusion to what I do. I write and I act and I did radio presenting before that. For years I thought, 'surely I can write a routine that I can then develop?'. My version of stand up is Twitter, I like to tweet a lot, trying to come up with tortuous puns. But tonight was very different. Tonight wasn't about 140 characters.....I haven't counted the number of characters in my routine but it was more than 140!

“I don’t know if this will lead to other things but I've broken my stand up duck again. If it’s possible for your virginity to be reformed, which I think it has, then I lost that tonight. Besides, sex has moved on since 1998!"

The opportunity to take to the stage in Immigrant Diaries, which discusses immigrants' lives in the UK through comedy, and personal stories, was one that Kohli was initially hesitant about after Sajeela Kershi, the organiser of the show, got in touch.

"I worked with Sajeela before, I wrote a Radio Scotland sitcom with her called Mixing it, and she actually played my mum! At first, I can't say I bit her hand off. But Immigrant Diaries is actually more about storytelling. It doesn't necessarily have to be a laugh-a-minute sort of thing. So I thought I could cope with that".

Kohli, born in England, part of a family who moved from India, said that his background has worked to his advantage.

"Sometimes in comedy, you're looking for new angles and well, I've always had the angle of growing up as an outsider. I had a perfectly safe, good childhood but culturally, it's probably why I'm in comedy. When you get sent to a Catholic school as a Sikh who was born in London, you see things differently. So I've probably managed to make it work to my favour".

The idea of the show was to promote understanding about immigration, amidst negative media coverage, and it reminded Kohli of writing for the show, Goodness, Gracious Me. "We could always make points through comedy more than we could with any sort of political ranting. I've often thought that with the character of Navid, there's this idea that we all actually have more in common than we do different. You can show that through the comedy. Comedy has always been a way of almost teaching without actually teaching. Sometimes you'd be taught without knowing you were being taught. If you were to watch any Bill Hicks' stuff, you learn while being entertained."

Of course Kohli was also part of the 21 show sell-out success of Still Game and said that it was something special. "It was incredible. We owe a debt of gratitude to Scotland for showing their support and I hope that we repaid it to them. I've had almost exclusively good feedback about the show. Strictly speaking, it shouldn't have worked in a venue that size, but it did. Those two boys (Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill) are incredibly clever with the way they wrote the show and Michael, who directed the show, was incredibly clever with the way he staged it. I think they knocked it off.

"It's all very well filling a place 21 times but if people hate it, it's the worst thing possible; you've disappointed Glastonbury twice. Whereas, people seem to like it, so it was lovely to be a part of. I'd love to recreate it but I don't know if we'd ever do the live thing again. I would love to tour it and take it to show the ex-pats; to Toronto, Sydney, the Middle East even. But I don't know what's happening with it. The good thing is that, as far as Ford and Greg are concerned, it's almost like carte blanche, almost like Avengers Assemble; when they decide, people will come. So that's a nice luxury for them".

The show is now part of Scotland's culture. Kohli says: "The moment that I knew it was sort of a part of the Scottish DNA was when we got the Hogmanay spot that had been traditionally used by Scotch and Wry. Our dad would tell us to shut up when Scotch and Wry was on, but he didn't need to tell us because we'd all sit and watch it. I know that when Still Game got that slot, my dad was very proud of me.

"It makes us feel old but I was at my brother's restaurant and there was joiner there, putting tables together who was about 25 or something. He was dead, dead nervous and when he got his picture taken he was shaking and he said to me, 'you got me through a really tough childhood'. So that kind of gets you a wee bit when you hear that. Comedy really is a very powerful thing."

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