Romesh Ranganathan, the comedian who promised to slow down and kept saying yes

Romesh Ranganathan

Photo: PhilipRomanoPhoto / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 27, 1978 Crawley, West Sussex, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Comedian, television presenter and actor
Known for	Despicable Me 4, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Cinderella
Awards	2 BAFTA · ARIA · ARIAS Gold, Best Music Entertainment

Romesh Ranganathan has spent most of his career being asked why he agrees to everything. The quiz show, the travelogue, the panel game, the radio slot, the sitcom he writes himself: there has rarely been a week on British television without him somewhere in the schedule. On Desert Island Discs he told Lauren Laverne there had never been a game plan, that he simply did “whatever feels good”, and then said something that sounded like a change of policy. “I am probably going to just be a bit more measured in what I do going forward,” he said, before adding, in case anyone was drafting tributes: “This is not an announcement of retirement.”

What followed was the busiest stretch of his working life. He made his West End debut opposite Sheridan Smith, fronted a contest show for Prime Video, joined the cast of The Celebrity Traitors on BBC One and booked an arena tour that promises, with a straight face, to change your life. His comedy has always run on reluctance, the sigh of a man dragged somewhere he did not want to go. The open question about Ranganathan now is what that deadpan means coming from someone who cannot stop saying yes.

He was born Jonathan Romesh Ranganathan in Crawley, West Sussex, on 27 March 1978, to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, Ranga and Shanthi, who had emigrated in 1970. He was raised Hindu in the town he later put in the title of his memoir, Straight Outta Crawley. When he was 12 his father’s finances collapsed. Ranga was later convicted of fraud and jailed for just under two years, and the family left their home for a room in a bed and breakfast arranged by a counsellor. Father and son reconciled before Ranga’s death in 2011. Shanthi, whom her son calls “one of my heroes”, became a fixture of his television work.

He studied mathematics at Birkbeck, University of London, and taught it at Hazelwick School in Crawley, where he had once been a pupil. At Hazelwick he met his wife, Leesa, who taught drama there. In his spare time he was Ranga, a freestyle rapper who reached the final of a UK freestyle competition, and hip-hop has stayed the most sincere thing about him: his BBC Radio 2 programme For The Love of Hip-Hop later won an ARIA as best specialist music show. He started doing stand-up while still in the classroom. “There’s not been a single day of my comedy career that’s even come close to the stress I felt as a teacher,” he said in 2025.

Panel shows such as Mock the Week took to his deadpan quickly, and he was a contestant in the first series of Taskmaster. In Asian Provocateur on BBC Three, his mother, having told him he was a “coconut”, sent him to Sri Lanka to meet his relatives, and that self-described coconut identity drove his early stand-up. His first major tour, Irrational Live, reached the Hammersmith Apollo in 2016. In 2018 he joined Sky’s A League of Their Own, published his memoir and moved his family to Los Angeles for the Showtime docuseries Just Another Immigrant, built around his attempt to sell out the Greek Theatre.

The BBC gave him the room to be curious. The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan sent him to Haiti, Ethiopia and Albania, countries rarely sold as holiday destinations, and won the BAFTA for Best Features in 2020. The Ranganation, his BBC Two topical show with 25 members of the public, his mother among them, earned him the BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance in 2021. Rob & Romesh Vs on Sky paired him with his friend Rob Beckett, and in December 2021 he replaced Anne Robinson at the podium of the BBC One revival of The Weakest Link. Acting followed: King Gary, then Avoidance, the BBC One comedy-drama he co-created with Benjamin Green, in which he plays Jonathan, a man who would rather hide out at his sister’s house with his son than tell the boy his parents are splitting up. In 2023 he voiced Nick, the cynical rat, in Aardman’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, and in April 2024 he took over Claudia Winkleman’s Saturday slot on BBC Radio 2.

The volume is also the case against him. Chortle has noted his reputation for taking on almost any job, and not all of it lands. Would You Rather: Decide to Survive, a six-part Prime Video contest for two teams of internet stars, launched in June 2026 and was reportedly cancelled after one series. The Sun reported: “Reviews for the show were poor and viewing figures reflected that.” Prime Video did not comment. His stage debut as Bill in Alan Ayckbourn’s Woman in Mind, opposite Smith at the Duke of York’s Theatre, drew notices that saved their warmth for her: Time Out found Smith “wonderful” and Ranganathan “decent”. The coconut routine that made his name also reads differently from a man who has become part of the furniture of British broadcasting. He is at his best when he is curious, and not every booking leaves him room for that.

He has been unusually open about his health. On Desert Island Discs in June 2025 he described “a number of periods of suicide ideation”, said that running, reading and breathing exercises help him, and told Laverne he was in “one of the best places I’ve ever been in my life”. He ran the 2024 London Marathon for the suicide-prevention charity Calm. He and Leesa married in 2009 and have three sons. He has been vegan since 2013 and supports Arsenal.

This autumn he is back on BBC One among the 21 celebrities in the second series of The Celebrity Traitors, alongside Rob Beckett and Julie Hesmondhalgh, the narrator of The Weakest Link. His Radio 2 show took gold for best music entertainment at the 2026 ARIAS. The stand-up never stopped: his last tour, Hustle, took him to the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Dubai, and was recorded at The O2 for the Sky series Can’t Knock the Hustle.

The next show is being tested in small rooms, with work-in-progress dates in Brighton, Crawley and Swindon at the end of October. The tour proper, Romesh Ranganathan Will Change Your Life, opens at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on 7 November and reaches arenas, The O2 among them, in 2027. The blurb calls it “scientifically proven to improve your self-esteem”, citing a sample of three people who live with him. Of all the things he keeps saying yes to, it is the one he has never shown any sign of giving up.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, comedians, Romesh Ranganathan, Avoidance, Rob Beckett, Sheridan Smith

Related People

Ajay Devgn

Robin Williams

Riz Ahmed

Roman Reigns

Trevor Noah

Hasan Minhaj