A young boy in a vest sits on a chair leaning forward so that he is looking at the floor. A woman’s hands gently and lovingly apply oil to his long black hair. So long, it has never been cut. His mother smooths it, combs it, twists it and ties it up, above his head, in a knot.
Now it’s 15 or so years later. A handsome man with short black hair in a busy newspaper office is deciding whether to interview Samuel L Jackson or Simon Cowell. (He chooses Cowell, perhaps because more people will read it, perhaps because it means he gets to go there in a Ferrari.)
The man and the boy are the same person. Sathnam Sanghera, Times journalist, interviewer of the famous, test driver of flash cars, leader of a metropolitan media life. And Sathnam Sanghera, son of Punjabi parents who emigrated to the UK in the 60s, who grew up in Wolverhampton, was raised as Sikh and whose father didn’t work because he has schizophrenia, although Sathnam didn’t know until he stumbled across his medication.
His memoir, from which The Boy With the Topknot (BBC Two) is adapted, was a kind of bridge between his two worlds: work and family, London and Wolverhampton, present and past. It was brave, and funny, and touching, and might have said something about Britain as well as about Sathnam and his family.
Three hundred (busy, eventful pages of prose) into 90 (minutes of TV drama) doesn’t go. Surgery is required. So there is much less from the past, his parents’ past, his own childhood.
Child Sathnam does appear again, after the beautiful hair-knotting opening, but as an apparition on a bicycle, more of a device than an actual character. Also less of, on screen than in print: school, India, immigration, Sikhism, haircuts, the haircut, which he snuck off and had at the age of 14.
It’s a pity, the loss (of the material, not the hair), but inevitable; television needs to be simpler, more linear. What is left are Sathnam’s attempts to tell his mum he doesn’t want to marry a nice Sikh girl. And his discovery about his dad’s – and his sister’s – mental illness.
At least that, such an important part of the book, survives the cull and is treated seriously and sensitively, though the viewer might be shouting even louder than the reader at Sathnam: how can you not have known?
It’s a lovely, understated performance by Anupam Kher as Sathnam’s father. His is the stand-out, but all three leads are excellent. Deepti Naval as his mum – uneducated, wise, loving, suffocating. And by Sacha Dhawan as Sathnam.
I don’t know Sathnam Sanghera, apart from reading him, and Dhawan’s Sathnam rings true with that guy – supersmart, quite into himself, knows it though and so isn’t rendered less likable.
Also growing wiser and less self-centred as he ages, his values change, he begins to understand the importance of family, and that he’s who and where he is because of them, not despite them.
And it all – mostly – rings true. The TV TBWTT might be pared down, but it’s loyal in spirit, a journey – made with trepidation, warmth and wit – back north-west, back in time, to uncover secrets about cultural difference and mental illness and love.
BUT (a big upper case one) the adaptation doesn’t just take away, it also adds, and this is not good news because what it adds is schmaltz. “Laura”, sure, is in the book, a girlfriend who can never be introduced because she’s a gori (a white woman), and who eventually leaves him.
But here she’s a major character, sharing a bath, and a bed, running out of patience, losing her temper, changing the locks. Because a TV drama and audience need romance and sex?
And not just romance but a neat romantic narrative arc and reconciliation, so that she’s back at the end … no not just on the phone Sathnam, but actually here at Wolverhampton station, behind you! Bloody hell, it’s like Love Actually’s moved to Wolverhampton.
No, it doesn’t need that. Because it didn’t happen. Because it’s as corny as corn. Because it distracts and detracts from the more interesting and important love letter, from Sathnam to his mother, to everyone else in his family, and to his past.