Born in Wolverhampton in 1961 and raised in Bloxwich, also in the West Midlands, Meera Syal is an actor, comedian, novelist and playwright who was awarded a damehood in the 2026 new year honours. Her first novel, Anita and Me, won the Betty Trask award in 1996. She rose to prominence as a writer and performer on Goodness Gracious Me and starred in The Kumars at No 42. She has two children and is married to the actor Sanjeev Bhaskar. Her memoir, Vigilauntie: A Memoir – Innit?, has just been published, and she is starring in The Children, at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 3 October.

I have no idea why I was posing with my hand on a pillar in a professional studio in Wolverhampton. My parents must have thought, “Let’s preserve the era of the only child before her brother comes along.” As it was the late 60s, I’ve got marriage-age shoes on and a slightly uncomfortable, sticky-out skirt. As for the hair, my mother clearly cut it with the kitchen scissors.

This was not a typical look for me. I spent most of my days in trousers and a T-shirt, rushing around Bloxwich on my bike. I had total freedom – if only my parents knew the things I fell off, climbed up, cut myself on, nearly drowned in or got impaled on.

We were the only Asian family in Bloxwich, and I was the only Asian girl in my school. There were a couple of Asian boys, who got bullied horribly, but I had a protective bubble around me because my mum was a teacher at the infant school. It got harder as I got older. It was the 70s and we were the visible wave of immigrants, so the reception wasn’t always friendly. I’m not proud of it, but I did have a brief fighting period. The school bully was a psychopath. If you looked at her the wrong way, she’d say, “I’m going to mash you out.” She’d stand at the side and let one of her little minions scrap instead – mostly hair-pulling, punching. I realised that being timid and running away made it much worse. The fact that you stood up for yourself made people think twice. They didn’t expect self-defence from a little brown girl.

My imagination came alive in my teen years, because I felt so out of place. I was surrounded by images of beauty in Jackie magazine – girls who were exclusively white, thin and blond. I had a culturally multifaceted life – at home I was very Indian, very cosy and warm, eating with my fingers, speaking my language. I’d code switch the moment I left: adopt a different persona, different accent, different walk. It’s no wonder I became an actor.

My one-woman play, One of Us, was a huge turning point. I developed it with my friend Jackie Shapiro at the University of Manchester, mainly because I thought, “If people knew half the stuff in my head, maybe they’d think differently about how they saw me, and people like me.” It got picked for the National Student Drama festival, then it went to the Edinburgh festival, where it won some prizes. Two weeks before I was due to take up an MA at Leeds to do drama and psychotherapy, a director walked in and said, “I’m about to do a new play by Sue Townsend. Would you like to be in it? And here’s an Equity card.” Until then, I had no idea how a person like me would get a foot in the door.

At the start of my career, I was sexually assaulted by somebody in the industry, somebody whom I trusted. That kind of behaviour was part of the culture in the 70s, 80s and even into the 90s. From remarks such as “Cheer up, darling” to the bum pinch, to what happened to me, everything was accepted as normal. But the sense of betrayal and shock almost made me give up. I thought, “I don’t have thick enough skin. If this is the way it’s going to be, I can’t do it.” Instead of being defeated, I got angry. Instead of shrinking, I tried to get bigger. It led me to meeting a bunch of women at the Asian Women Writers’ Collective who lifted me. I found my tribe. I got politicised. I started writing properly. I was fuelled by so much rage and injustice, and realised the corrosive part of assault is the silence around it. It was an awful thing to go through, but it changed the trajectory of my life.

I’d been working in theatre for years when I got my first TV job. It was on The Bill and I had to run down Whitechapel High Street in London shouting, “There’s a bomb in the restaurant!” My uncles and aunties thought my career was a waste of time, so for me to be able to tell them I was on television – even for 10 seconds – was the marker of something.

Victoria Wood was my absolute idol. I looked up to her completely. Then one day I got a call, “Victoria is doing a new sitcom called Dinnerladies. She’d like to see you.” I rehearsed the part a million times; I knew it inside out. And yet … I did the worst audition of my life – just a bad Mrs Overall impression. I learned that when you want something too much, you’re going to screw it up. Shobna Gulati went on to play the role of Anita and she was brilliant, but I couldn’t watch it for a long time as the memory was too painful.

From 1991 to 1996, I worked on a series called The Real McCoy. It was a black sketch show, a huge success, and undoubtedly opened the door for Goodness Gracious Me. We decided to approach Jon Plowman at the BBC about the concept, who said, “I don’t really know what south Asian humour is.” Neither did we. It was hard to explain as we were never thought of as funny: we were the people that sold you fags in the corner shop or set your bones in a hospital or served you curry in a restaurant. We weren’t seen as observant or ironic or absurd. But we knew what made us laugh, and we were given a chance. We assembled a team of writers and actors, and threw together a night at the Riverside Studios. The roar of the audience who finally felt seen was intoxicating. We had to hold on to that feeling throughout the commissioning process, which took years. But it eventually transformed our lives.

In my 60s, I’ve realised this career is a marathon, not a sprint. The actors I admire most are the women who have survived through the dead zone where you’re not considered attractive or relevant. There was a time when you hit 50 and had to get the slippers out, because there was going to be very little work until the batty old grandma parts came up. That has changed over the last few decades, thankfully. It’s not perfect but it is better – and the juicy roles for women come more from theatre than television.

Sometimes I wish I could save that seven-year-old version of me from the fear and insecurity that’s ahead. I also wish I could tell her: when you are 39 you are going to meet Donny Osmond – the boy whose poster you kiss every night. Most of all, I wish she could know that one day other Desis will come up to her and say, “I grew up watching you. You made a difference to the way I walked down the street and felt about myself.” All of the loneliness, the bad experiences, will transform into stories – stories that change people for good.