Sanjeev Kohli 'fired up' by the idea

Cult Radio 4 comedy Fags Mags and Bags could become a live show.

Co-writer and star Sanjeev Kohli said he was ‘fired up’ to translate the sitcom to the stage.

Set in an Asian-run corner shop on the outskirts of Glasgow, the series recently returned to Radio 4 after a three-year hiatus.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Feedback show today, Kohli said the series was originally written without a studio audience in mind – but thought it could easily translate to a live performance.

He said: ‘Because we wanted to make it quite dense and because we wanted to have a lot of observations and niche jokes, I never wanted an audience.

’We’ve done five series without an audience [actually six] and been very successful. And then we did these script readings and people were laughing as hard at these incredibly niche observations as they were at something which I would have considered more broad. 

‘That was incredibly gratifying, and that’s certainly fired me up to have the show as a live thing and take it around the UK.  That would be brilliant.’

The cast, including Kohli and co-writer Donald McLeary performed the live run-through of two episodes of the show at Oran Mor in Glasgow in 2013.

Since then, the cast of Still Game had huge success with the live version of their Glasgow-based sitcom, which ran for 21 nights at The SSE Hydro, grossing £6million in ticket sales.
 

Published: 17 Jun 2016