Heritage Revisited: The Cultural Politics of Heritage in Goodness Gracious Me

How does one ground political action towards social transformation and cultural self-representation in a public sphere increasingly dominated by pervasive and persuasive media screens? I look for answers to this opening question in BBC’s comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, written and performed by British-born artists of South Asian descent. Breaking out from its initial target area and crossing over to a non-Asian audience, the show promptly achieved cult status in Britain and worldwide commercial success. Drawing primarily on the second series of Goodness Gracious Me, in particular its satire of the allure of the past for British film and television, my paper will chart the way narrative strategies characteristic of heritage works, such as the nostalgic tones and the thematic stress on setting, are strategically disrupted in the sitcom. Within this framework, it is my purpose to stress that parodic sketches of The Jewel in the Crown and Pride and Prejudice rely on the audience’s familiarity with heritage visual and thematic features, and reassert the interstitiality of British Asian cultural production.