Face change: (Top) Waris Hussein; Matt Smith

Perhaps it is time for the Queen to say, “Arise, Sir Waris!”

But let me tell the story in a logical way.

Last week, with huge fanfare BBC television announced the identity of the 11th actor to play Dr Who in its cult sci-fi series of the same name. An audience of 6.9 million tuned in for the breaking news that the role had been awarded to Matt Smith, a relatively unknown actor.

At 26, he is the youngest of the 11 men who have played Dr Who, a “Time Lord” capable of travelling to distant galaxies in the Tardis, his space machine. In marked contrast, the first Dr Who, William Hartnell, was a 55-year-old grandfather.

Last week’s tamasha was watched with moderate amusement by Waris Hussein, who, as has been pointed out before, was the first person to direct the Dr Who pilot series in 1963.

“I got it because no one else wanted it and I was the most junior,” recalls Waris. “The series was given a life of six weeks.”

Forty-five years on, it has become the BBC’s biggest money spinner.

Waris was then 25 and barely out of Cambridge. Now he has outgrown Dr Who, who keeps getting reinvented to keep alive his appeal to successive generations.

This year Waris hopes to direct a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, starring possibly Sir Derek Jacobi, one of England’s greatest actors who is currently pulling in West End crowds as Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

“I directed Jacobi when we were undergraduates at Cambridge,” discloses Waris. He was born in 1938 in Lucknow. Jacobi was born the same year in Leytonstone, East London. Their paths crossed in Cambridge in the early Sixties. And in 1994 Jacobi duly received a knighthood for services to the theatre.

Ten years earlier, the film director David Lean had received his knighthood. He had studied the adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India that Waris had done for television in 1965. Lean’s film came out in 1984, the year that he became Sir David Lean.

What is remarkable about Waris is that, unlike many of today’s ambitious British Asians, he has played neither the Muslim nor the ethnic card in an attempt to build a successful career. Waris has always been happy to let his talent speak for him.

If the Queen can see fit to bestow knighthoods on Derek Jacobi and David Lean, it seems only fair she should summon Waris Hussein to Buckingham Palace and utter the familiar words: “Arise, Sir Waris!”

A new film version of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is not the only big Indian project that has been cancelled by British television. Following ITV’s cancellation of A Passage to India, I hear the BBC has pulled the plug on The Foolish Things, adapted from the novel by Deborah Moggach.

The 60 year-old author has produced 16 novels including The Ex-Wives and Tulip Fever, adapted many of her books for television and has also written several film scripts, including the BAFTA-nominated screenplay for Pride & Prejudice.

Written in 2004, These Foolish Things tells the story of a retirement home in Bangalore which seeks to recreate a sort of lost England for British pensioners. In today’s parlance, old people from England are outsourced to India where they can expect to get the kind of attention and care that would not be possible in their own country. Ravi Kapoor, an Indian doctor worn down by his London practice and the pressure of looking after his difficult father-in-law, heads for the retirement home which has been set up by his local cousin, Sonny.

Like everyone else, television is having to save money by cutting back on expensive drama. But high brow television is not being sacrificed.

HALCYON DAYS: Shilpa Shetty

Last week, Celebrity Big Brother returned to our screens, courtesy Channel 4. Two years ago, Shilpa Shetty went in, kept Indians glued to the screens, along with a significant proportion of the rest of the television audience. She clashed with a bunch of working class British lasses, disclosed a Bollywood actor by the name of Akshay Kumar had broken her heart by cheating on her, gained fame, fortune and Max Clifford as her agent by winning the show, forgave her former adversaries in true Gandhian style, granted an audience to the Queen, made time for the prime minister, and issued a 1000-word press release denying she was having an affair with a married businessman, Raj Kundra, whose marriage, let’s face it, was on the rocks, anyway, when they had met, not that their relationship was anything but platonic, but you know, how these things can develop and love can grow in the most unexpected ways, why blame a simple girl like her for that when the said Raj Kundra, hereinafter referred to as the boyfriend of the first party, has chosen to lavish money on her pet projects, perfumes, recipe books, yoga DVDs, maybe the odd film or two, not that this had anything to do with how a girl feels when she loses her heart…(continued on page 19).

Frankly, it is hard to remember the names of those who are in Celebrity Big Brother House now, save possibly Ulrika Johnson, a blond Swede and a former weathergirl, who has had four children by four different men, though none with a former lover, one time England football coach, Sven-Goran Eriksson, who has also had an affair with the Bangladeshi secretary, Faria Alam, who was on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006 but got voted out by the British public pretty sharpish.

Faria has claimed she has had an affair with Salman Khan, who could not even remember meeting the girl. This year, I can disclose, many Bollywood types were dying to follow Shilpa into Celebrity Big Brother but weren’t asked.

Bold and beautiful: Deepika Padukone

My, as they say, hasn’t she grown? Last time Deepika Padukone adorned the red carpet in Leicester Square for the premiere of her debut film, Om Shanti Om, the diffident 21-year-old was ushered in by Shah Rukh Khan. He was gentle with her.

Tomorrow, back in Leicester Square, it is Deepika on whom the cameras will be focused as Akshay Kumar tamely follows her in for the European premiere of Chandni Chowk To China.

With SRK, she had brought the house down by gazing reverentially at him and murmuring she had grown up admiring him from the time she was in kindergarten (or words to that effect) — game, set and shuttlecock to Deepika the Dangerous.

The ageing AK had better watch out.

Tittle tattle

Now that there are plans to turn the clash between England skipper Kevin Pietersen and head coach Peter Moores into a movie or a docu-drama, wits are suggesting Pietersen could be played by Sourav Ganguly and Moores by Greg Chappell.