Sanjeev Bhaskar’s new role as a doctor will please his father, who wanted him to go into medicine. But the acting profession has been good to him, he tells Steve Pratt.

THE Kumars At No 42 star Sanjeev Bhaskar didn’t have to go far from home to research playing an Indian doctor who moves to Britain in the early Sixties, in a new BBC1 Daytime series.

‘‘My dad came over in the Fifties and I had a great-uncle who was a doctor in Harley Street, who’d arrived even earlier. He was very posh and wore a bow tie,” he recalls.

‘‘I remember when I started school, I was one of only two Asian kids, but by the time I finished secondary education, one third of the school was Asian, so it was a really dramatic change. That major influx transformed the population in the Seventies.”

In The Indian Doctor, he plays high-flying Delhi graduate Dr Prem Sharma, who moves to Britain as part of the first wave of highly-qualified doctors who came from India to help resolve the staffing crisis in the NHS.

He arrives with his wife, Kamini, to find he’s been posted to a small Welsh mining village.

Bhaskar, who was born in London in 1963, says the drama appealed to him because the Sixties was such an “incredible decade in terms of social history for Britain”.

In total, about 18,000 doctors were recruited from the Indian subcontinent by Health Minister Enoch Powell, who’d go on to criticise immigration in 1968 with his infamous Rivers of Blood speech.

“The irony was not lost on me that Enoch Powell had sent out requests for doctors to come over and then, within six or seven years, was telling them to clear off home,” says Bhaskar.

His Harley Street-based great-uncle was one of the luckier doctors, he says. “For a lot of the Commonwealth, their image of England was London.

That’s what they’d seen from newsreels and magazines – old mill towns in the North didn’t appear.

“These doctors were sent out to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but what’s interesting is how many of them stayed and became part of those communities.”

Outsider Prem is able to see things others have become blind to and, with the help of a diary left behind by his predecessor, he exposes the poor conditions at the local mine.

He admits that one person who’ll be delighted to see him playing a doctor is his dad, who initially hoped his son would train in medicine. “I think this is as close as it’s going to get,” he says.

“My parents are incredibly supportive. I started in a profession they didn’t know and couldn’t help me with. They were worried I might be chasing a pipe dream.”

It wasn’t until he reached his 30s that Bhaskar achieved his ambition to be an actor. A dutiful son, he took a marketing degree and worked for IBM for eight years before starting a double act, The Secret Indians, with his old friend and musician, Nitin Sawhney.

His big break came when they were spotted by the producer of a sketch show that would become Goodness Gracious Me, where he met his future wife and mother of his son, Shaan (Meera Syal).

Success has come as a surprise. ‘‘When I was 30, I thought, that’s it, my life’s mapped out. I was working in a blue-collar job and thought I’d be paying off debt for the rest of my life.

“I’ve had extraordinary good fortune. It’s bizarre, it’s like I’m living someone else’s life, but I’m not going to give it back.”

Bhaskar and Syal try to arrange their schedules so there’s someone to look after both Shaan and Syal’s daughter, Chameli. “We both feel more comfortable if one of the parents is at home, we do our best not to destabilise their routines,” he says.

Fatherhood has changed his view of life, as well as his priorities – “I’m very suspicious of people who become parents and don’t change. It’s such a profound thing.”

As a father, Bhaskar’s done the obligatory turn on CBeebies and also brought his family to see him play King Arthur in the Monty Python musical Spamalot, in the West End.

He admits that the stage has provided him with the most varied opportunities. “The most colourblind casting I’ve experienced has been in theatre.

Television’s got better because there’s a greater awareness coming through.

“I certainly don’t have any complaints. I live a charmed life, way beyond anything I deserve.”

■ The Indian Doctor, BBC1, 2.15pm, Monday to Friday.