Hardeep Singh Kohli: Hardeep is Your Love?

It seems bizarre that a comic as articulate and insightful as Hardeep Singh Kohli ever appeared on anything as pedestrian as The One Show. Prone to rounding off a poetic turn of phrase with an inoffensive f-bomb, Kohli is first and foremost a proud Weege who grew up round the corner from this converted house of God, Òran Mór, where we’re now talking about love, sex and race. 

Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o recently talked about growing up without a black role-model of beauty, and Kohli’s show, Hardeep Is Your Love? sets out with a similar problem. Until very recently, all the beautiful people in magazines were white, and even now most of the lovers we watch on-screen are similarly pale-skinned. A white man of any age can find love on film, but what about the rest of the world? When was the last time you saw someone wearing a turban in a rom-com? 

Cast adrift into the dating pool in his thirties, Kohli simply had to make it up as he went along, and the show that came out of it doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. It has a happy middle, though, and his deep Glaswegian roots mean a very happy start. Kohli is a master of pace, drawing us along with a long thread of a story, but still quick-witted enough to have fantastic patter with his crowd between punchlines. His congregation is part-Radio 4, part-sniggering-into-a-dram-at-closing-time, and he plays to every side of them perfectly: not averse to the melancholy of drifting through life without the winds of romance, and no stranger to the odd dick joke either.