Familiar Voice on ‘Silver Street’

A few days ago I briefly extolled the virtues of the BBC’s daily radio drama, Silver Street, which is made available via podcast.

If you’ve been listening to this “Asian EastEnders” (terribly sorry, but it remains the quickest way to sum it up), you’ll know that the long, awkward arm of the law has swooped into the England’s Silver Hill area and left tragedy in its wake. Poor newlywed Zak had the misfortune to share a home with radical Muslim Talib, which resulted in the pair of them being nabbed by police in a nighttime raid. In the process, Zak’s new wife, Fatima (played by the already missed Gia Avan), was killed in a road accident, and Great Britain’s latest debate about extending the length of time terror suspects can be held without charge was given a very human face, or at least a voice.

One of the characters caught up in the resulting police fracas was kindly Dr. Masud. If the good doctor’s voice has sounded maddeningly familiar to you, it’s because the actor is none other than Saeed Jaffrey. In addition to the dozens of roles he’s had in Indian cinema, he has appeared in My Beautiful Laundrette, The Razor’s Edge and Gandhi.

And more importantly to fans of that classic dramedy Rumpole of the Bailey (which you can learn oh so much more about by reading an interview with the series’ creator, John Mortimer, in 30 Years of British Television – your shameless author), Jaffrey was the wily GP Dr. Rahmat in “Rumpole and the Quacks.”

Now the first time I saw that episode, there was no IMDB — a darker age, that — so I missed an in-joke that I only caught last night, nearly 20 years later, when I looked up the actor’s CV. In that 1991 Rumpole, Rahmat bases his defense against a sexual assault charge on E.M Forster’s classic novel A Passage to India. In 1984, Jaffrey played Advocate Hamidullah in … HBO’s A Passage to India! (I think this may be the longest it’s ever taken me to get a joke.)