The Curry House Kid: Flock horror - Akram Khan cooks up some tasty moves from his curry house youth

Tonight, Channel 4, 10pm

Making naan bread has never looked so elegant.

In The Curry House Kid, dancer and choreographer Akram Khan mimes kneading the dough and putting it in the tandoori oven, then bringing it out to tables of hungry customers.

Khan, 44, won an Olivier Award last month for Xenos, which brought to life the experiences of a shellshocked Indian soldier during the First World War. He’s worked with Kylie Minogue, composer Steve Reich and a troupe of dancers at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. But this is the first time he has told his own story.

Khan is the son of Bangladeshi immigrants and grew up above the curry house they ran in Wimbledon. The restaurant was an integral part of his life — he helped out in the kitchen and waited on tables. His father, who started working aged 10 to provide for his brothers and sisters, assumed Khan would take over the family business.

Channel 4

But Khan hated the curry house. He was embarrassed that his clothes smelled of curry and didn’t like the way the brash English customers treated him. He wanted to dance — their kitchen floor had to be replaced three times because he wore it out practising. So he turned his back on his heritage.

Now, though, he’s ready to return to it and is doing so in the way he knows best — by devising a dance performance. He’s acutely aware that dancers exist in a small, often conservative world so his curry house dance is a bold departure.

It’s not just about Khan, though — he puts his family history in the wider context of Bangladeshi immigration to London, and then throws it forward to the future of curry houses.

Khan is an engaging presenter: gentle, open and unafraid to make mistakes when cooking with his interviewees. We meet his mother, who was more encouraging of his dancing than his father. She took him to Indian classical dance to distract him from his Michael Jackson obsession. Jackson was the first artist Khan could relate to. Until then, all his heroes had been white, and he would scratch his skin to see if he was also white underneath the brown. Revisiting the past is painful for Khan — he associates curry houses with being racially abused by white customers and having to take it.

Brick Lane is his focus because it’s London’s Bangladeshi curry hub. Through archive footage and interviews with veterans of the curry scene, he paints a portrait of a changing area. It’s the Bangladeshi community there who brought curry to the British people. They have struggled, faced National Front protests and the Battle of Brick Lane in 1978, when a young Bangladeshi textile worker was murdered.

His interviewees are various and also have plenty of stories. There’s a man who started as an onion-chopper in a restaurant aged 11 and is still there, and a younger woman who has been brought in by the council to help the restaurants adapt. Many are male-run and stuck in a Seventies time warp, with sprawlingly long menus and flock wallpaper.

Akram Khan: Until the Lions, in pictures

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The programme culminates in a dance performance, and it’s how Khan best expresses himself. Moving is an outlet for all the uncertainty, identity struggles and hostility that is part of the immigrant experience. There’s a taut soundtrack, of traditional Bangladeshi music with lingering sitar sounds remixed and interspersed with modern compositions.

Khan may feel guilty for turning his back on his people but this dance telling their story is a credit to him. It’s a good thing he can dance — turns out he’s not much good at making naan bread.

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