Mrs. Sidhu: Food, Music, and Mysteries
MRS SIDHU INVESTIGATES – a series created by Suk Pannu ⁓
Mrs. Suki Sidhu (Meera Syal) runs a catering company in the town of Slough which rhymes with “plow” and is located midway between London and Reading on the M4. She has one son named Tez (Gurgeet Singh), and at least three nephews whom we have not met. (Tez refers to them in passing as Bunty, Bitoo, and Bally.) “Arterial fat” killed her husband two years ago. Her father, Detective Inspector Baldev Singh Bedi, was killed trying to foil a bank robbery on 14 May 1977. Suki was thirteen at the time.
After accidentally discovering two murder victims, Mrs. Sidhu meets Detective Chief Inspector Burton (Craig Parkinson), who is on the verge of being forced into retirement after taking the blame for unspecified recent screw-ups. The Detective is a bit grumpy about that. He is also grumpy about his ex-wife Janine getting nearly everything in their recent divorce, so at the start, he has little patience for Mrs. Sidhu’s attempts to help his investigations. “You ever see any TV shows made in the 70’s?” he says. “Apparently, it was the golden age of the quirky cop. They had the cowboy detective, and the fat detective. – Now meet lady caterer detective.” (Thankfully, Mrs. Sidhu does not even superficially resemble Frank Cannon or Sam McCloud.)
In the past, DCI Burton got into trouble by following his “gut instincts”. Mrs. Sidhu suggests that the scientific justification for doing that is: “the brain in our gut, aka the enteric nervous system. Two thin layers of a hundred million nerve cells in our gastric tract” and goes on to suggest that “it’s where intuition lives.”
The show has plenty of vivid side characters, most notably the self-styled witch Tituba Hemlock (Jodie McNee), gossipy office manager Pauline Kent (Llwella Gideon), and the casually chatty crime boss Nora (Jo Martin).
Mrs. Sidhu knows little about the circumstances of her father’s death. According to a news clipping, he was run down by the bank robbers’ getaway car. He died from a “bleed to the brain”.
While laying flowers on the anniversary of her father’s death, she meets Burton’s boss, Superintendent Alvin de Vries (Gordon Kennedy), who is doing the same thing, and who was with her father when he died. “I wasn’t in the bank,” he explains. “I remember them fleeing in their car, a red Escort. Baldev tryna stop them. Then Baldev lying on the road. We stopped the traffic. And Dave, my beat colleague, called an ambulance and tried to stem the bleeding, I held his hand and told him he was gonna be all right. And then the paramedics came, but, he’d already slipped away.”
Her delivery van, a Daihatsu Hijet 1.3 EFI, is named Jolene and she plays country music (Bollywood with banjos, she calls it) while she drives. We hear “Take Me Away”, by Lakewood Cemetery, and “Blue California”, by the Bellamy Brothers. Part of an unidentified song (which might be another by Lakewood Cemetery) is heard in the first episode.
When Taz complains: “All these songs about California. How come no one wrote a song about Slough?”, she impresses him by quoting from The Jam‘s song The Eton Rifles.
She prefers to be called “chef” rather than “cook”, and some of the dishes she prepares in the course of the show are: Blackened cod balls in coriander-infused gram flour; Tom Yum Soup with lemongrass, fresh ginger and shrimp; Malabar spiced eggs sealed in a hot paratha; Thai Chicken Lollipops; and Laddoos, which she describes as “melted ghee and graham flour flavoured with cardamon, deep-fried in oil and steeped in syrup until it’s very, very bad for you”.
One particularly eloquent villainess points out why Mrs. Sidhu solves cases that others cannot. “And that’s why you figured it out before the real detective did,” she tells the amateur sleuth, “because you know what it’s like to be erased, dismissed. And you’re furious about it.”
Showrunner Suk Pannu spoke to Mansha Dawsani of TV Drama about Detective Burton and his unofficial partner, Mrs. Sidhu: “Heโs had an excruciating married life, an excruciating divorce and is now living an excruciating single life. Returning to work, having screwed up his last case, he meets the worst woman he wants to meet but probably the woman he needs to meet – his symbiotic other half. I always wanted her to be a super sleuth, right up there with Marple. She has ways of finding out what people are doing. She has all these nephews and nieces, so sheโs lived within this culture, finding out peopleโs secrets..Sheโs charming, has ways of getting under peopleโs skins and is very annoying, the way aunties are!”
The series began as a half-hour sitcom on BBC Radio 4.