Series Creator Suk Pannu Talks 'Mrs. Sidhu Investigates' & Catering to Crime Solving

Mrs. Sidhu Investigates ended its first season Monday, October 9 (just in time for Canadian Thanksgiving!) with an episode that finds our intrepid caterer (played to perfection by Meera Syal) searching for a kidnapped boxer. Over the course of the season’s four episodes, Mrs. Sidhu, while preparing lattes and crab korma, has become an unlikely sleuth, much to the chagrin of her chosen partner-in-crime-solving, DCI Burton (Craig Parkinson). Juggling her directionless son Tez (Gurjeet Singh) and many suspects with a smile that belies her inner grit, Mrs. Sidhu is a crime-solving auntie extraordinaire. “She’s inverting the white savior,” says series creator and writer Suk Pannu. 
 
Pannu, who also serves as one of the Acorn TV series’ executive producers, adapted the show from his popular BBC Four radio show of the same name that ran for two seasons in the U.K. “Radio is wonderful but tells a story in a different way,” he says. “TV, you want to see it all. It has to be on the surface. That was a learning curve for me to adapt these characters to a more visual format.”
 
Below Pannu chats with Telly Visions about the series and what might be possible if it’s renewed for a second season. 

Telly Visions: Obviously, Mrs. Sidhu’s cooking is a huge part of the series. I put this in my review, but I really think there needs to be a cookbook tie-in to the series. All the food looks so delicious. 
 
Suk Pannu: I think that would be such a great idea. It feels like it could be part of the family of the show. It would be cool to get a chef to be involved in it. It’s one of the things I love about writing and creating the show is that food is one of the layers that runs through it. It’s part of my culture and how we grew up, and she, as a character, is more aspirational. So she wants to do not just cooking but chefing. She wants to be doing more of this great cooking, more of this haute cuisine kind of thing, which is kind of working for her a little bit because she’s getting these great jobs now. I have a lot of fun. Some of those recipes are kind of made up like an Easternized version of a Christmas cake or something like that.
 
TV: Setting the show in a catering atmosphere gives you a lot of opportunities.
 
SP: One of the reasons is I worked in catering as a younger man. I love The Bear, those sorts of shows – it was kind of a world I knew reasonably well. She’s a woman in transition. She’s transforming herself. She’s been bereaved. Asian women were not going to go out there and do stuff. She’s turned that on its head. She’s used what she knows and inverted it. So it’s a really positive move for her. 

TV: I really appreciated how, throughout the series, Mrs. Sidhu talks to her late father and her late husband and that they are both still part of her life. 
 
SP: Most of us, by the time we get to our ages, we’ve all known some kind of grief. While the show is light-hearted, comedy helps you put your problems in perspective. So those scenes are funny. It’s one of her many eccentricities. So we kind of know her as a character, but it’s also full of heart. It’s kind of her link to crime, in a way. This was something I could have done, but my dad died, and once he died, that dream died. The emotional bond is just right there, and what Meera does with it is absolutely fantastic. She’s funny, charming, and touching in one go. That is a package you don’t always get.
 
TV: The settings where Mrs. Sidhu stumbles upon a crime are so much fun. How do you come up with them?
 
SP: When you get a strong location, they start generating character. I think that’s what makes it exciting. The pilot was set in a luxury gym. I was doing these classes where you’re synchronized to music and lifting weights. So I thought this was a great setting, and what was really interesting around that time was that the trainers were becoming absolute global superstars. That’s a great high-stakes setting with a kind of humorous touch to it. Would you believe that on the very eve of COVID-19, I went to one of those classes, and I hurt my back and got a slipped disc? The good news is I had something to work on during COVID-19, so I was really lucky. But I had to do it on my back. It was kind of ironic this great inspiration had also found my Achilles heel. 

TV: In the final scene of the season, it seems like Burton is coming around to Mrs. Sidhu being his unofficial crime-solving partner. 
 
SP: [Laughs] We will see how long that lasts. A lot of the fun in the show is them and the sheer joy of watching them clash. She’s saved his bacon. She’s solved these crimes. She’s been right there and instrumental in getting these things sorted out. He’s an honest guy, even if he’s a kind truculent one. He has to have some nods to that while preserving his shell, I think, in some way.
 
TV: The other sort of shift is in Mrs. Sidhu’s relationship with her son. He seems to have matured a bit by the end of the season. 
 
SP: Full disclosure: He’s kind of me back then. I think almost everyone in their late teens, early 20s, you don’t know quite what you are going to do. He’s just a guy who hasn’t quite found what he wants to do. He’s somebody who is slowly finding ways forward. It’s interesting because he starts to help her inadvertently with her cooking. He’s always looking outside, could he be in the tech business, could he be in Game of Thrones. He’s a dreamer, for sure, but he has these moments of wisdom as well.

TV: Do you think Mrs. Sidhu will ever start to worry that maybe she’s bad luck since she keeps finding dead bodies at her catering jobs, or are we supposed to think maybe she has many catering jobs in between the ones we are seeing? 
 
SP: That’s sort of it isn’t. When [Agatha] Christie wrote the Marple books, Marple was tripping over bodies all the time. But novels come out with less frequency than a TV show. You almost imagine the amount of time that has passed in her life is a time between novels. We have a problem because you imagine subconsciously that the time that has passed in her life is a week. Because there she was last week, and she found another body this week. Oh my god. That’s crazy. At the same time, there’s such a thirst for that kind of development. The fans go, ‘Yeah, I’ll buy it as long as I’m entertained by this. The story is good, and the characters are great. I’m in for this.’ 
 
TV: The show hasn’t been picked up yet for a second season, but have you started thinking about what a second season might look like?
 
SP: I was dreaming about Season 2 before I even solved the first one. That’s all we do: sit in sheds and dream. I don’t know whether we’ll get Season 2. Fingers crossed, of course. We’ve had great support from Monumental Television, our producers, ACORN UK, ACORN US, and AMC, so we are hopeful. We would love to do more. The season ends with a little shift in the relationship with Mrs. Sidhu and Burton. It would be nice to develop what’s going on there and with the other returning characters. I think there’s lots to build on. It would be interesting to weave some of those stories into what is the most important thing, which is the story of the week. 

All episodes of Mrs. Sidhu Investigates Season 1 are streaming on Acorn TV.