A Glasgow shopkeeper who has stood behind the same counter for more than twenty years and made the counter the point. Sanjeev Kohli's Navid is the driest voice in Still Game; the rest of his work is quieter, and far less often seen.
Fi1m perspective
Navid Harrid stands behind the counter of his Craiglang shop and treats every customer as an interruption. He is the authority in his own shop and his customers never let him keep it, so the sarcasm comes out flat, unhurried and aimed at whoever has just walked in. Kohli speaks him in a Glasgow voice with South Asian rhythms underneath, which is not a trick but the way he grew up talking, his family having moved from London to Glasgow when he was three. When we reviewed Still Game (2002) we said the ensemble stopped Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill's double act from exhausting the joke. Kohli is a good part of why.
He came to acting sideways. He presented on radio in the 1990s and wrote sketches for Chewin' the Fat and Goodness Gracious Me before Kiernan and Hemphill cast him in 2002, and he has said it was his first time acting with any of them. He stayed with the show through its original run, the revival and the live shows. Alongside it he has co-written and starred, with Donald McLeary, in the radio comedy Fags, Mags and Bags from 2007, as Ramesh Majhu, who also owns a corner shop. From 2015 he was a regular in River City as AJ Jandhu, a former banker turned local businessman. The film work, Filth (2013), Stan & Ollie (2018), Limbo (2020), and television such as Magpie Murders (2022), has been in supporting parts, and we have not reviewed it.
What works is the shop. Kohli draws on his own family's experience of running one, and the result is a character who is never the joke: the customers are. Navid is not a victim and not a type, and the writing gives him the last word more often than anyone else in Craiglang. We will admit that Navid's contempt for his own trade made us laugh harder than most of the set pieces, and the reason is that Kohli never plays the insult as a punchline. He says it as if it were simply true, and moves on to the next customer.
The caveat is the one he has named himself. He is Navid to a large public, has said he probably always will be, and has said he is happy about it. That is a generous position and it is also a small one; a performer who can make a man behind a till this exact ought to be asked to do more, and the roles in Limbo and River City suggest people have started asking. We cannot judge those here. What we can say is that two shopkeepers across two decades is either a comfortable groove or a field he has made his own, and on the evidence of Still Game we lean towards the second.
Biography
Sanjeev Kohli is a British actor, comedian and writer. He is best known for his role as shopkeeper Navid Harrid in the BBC sitcom Still Game (2002–2007, 2016–2019).
Kohli has also appeared as A.J. Jandhu in the BBC Scotland soap opera River City (from 2015) and as Ramesh Majhu in the radio sitcom Fags, Mags and Bags (from 2007). He has written for programmes including Goodness Gracious Me, The Big Breakfast and Chewin' the Fat, and has presented on BBC Asian Network. His film credits include Filth (2013) and Stan & Ollie (2018).
Born in Brentford, London, in 1971, Kohli studied at the University of Glasgow.
