My heart sank when; Corrie offered me; REBECCA SARKER THOUGHT NITA DESAI MIGHT BE CORONATION STREET'S TOKEN ASIAN - BUT SHE COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG.

Rebecca Sarker, who can fairly lay claim to being the most beautiful woman on British television, is elegantly sprawled on a leather sofa, telling me about her love life. There are worse ways of spending a chilly afternoon in Manchester.

It seems the entire world is concerned about her involvement with unsuitable men. Women in headscarves stop her outside shops, minicab drivers shout: "Give him up. He only wants you for your body, love."

We are, of course deep in that no-man's land where the twin forces of reality and fantasy face each other. The advice Rebecca is constantly being given is not on account of her own romantic status (of which more later) but that of her Coronation Street character, Nita Desai. In particular, the recent sex-in-the-workplace story-line, when Nita slept with a managing director's nephew, then was turned down for a promotion she was led to believe was hers.

Few plots in any soap have caused such controversy or produced such violent reactions.

You were either on Nita's side - she was exploited and used - or saw in her the signs of an ambitious and calculating bitch.

In this photographer's studio high above the rooftops, Rebecca goes off to change, reappearing in a fringed buckskin number that could have come straight from the plains of Wyoming. This, too, is a symbol of sorts. One way of looking at this 24-year-old is to see her as just as much of a trail-blazer as those grizzled cowboys who set out to conquer the West. In television terms, Rebecca is a pioneer. Thirteen months ago she walked on to our screens as a member of the first Asian family to be given a prominent role in Coronation Street since the show began in 1960.

Rebecca's part in the development of healthy race relations may not seem as important as anti- discrimination laws. But just consider for a moment. In little over a year, this daughter of a Bangladeshi father and an English mother has become a permanent fixture in a show that is a national institution. She drinks in the Rovers, buys her magazines in The Kabin, she even shares the odd pizza with Curly and you can't get closer to the heart of the place than that. So completely has Nita been accepted in the land of the Lancashire hotpot that nowadays few people even notice the colour of her skin.

But Rebecca knows how horribly it could have gone wrong.

"I read the scripts very carefully. If the Desais had been portrayed as thick, or as laughing stocks, it would have been insulting. But they trod carefully, they slipped us in a very understated way.

"You do worry, of course you do. I've been lucky, I've had a multi- cultural upbringing. But I know racism does go on. It touched me just once, when I was very small. I can't remember the exact incident, but I remember coming home and asking my mum, `What's a Paki?'. Obviously, someone had called me that. Mum dealt with it brilliantly. She didn't make an issue of it, which might have got me very nervous about life from then on. She just said, `Take no notice,' and it never happened again.

"I wanted to give The Street my best shot on a personal level, but I realised that Nita was something more, she represented hundreds of thousands of Asian women. I felt a responsibility to them."

Despite the fact that when the offer came Rebecca was working as a translator to make ends meet - she didn't exactly bite her agent's hand off.

"My heart sank when I heard Coronation Street were going to include an Asian family. It had been done on TV before and it had nearly always failed. I thought, `Oh no, not again'. And then I wondered whether I was Asian- looking enough or whether they would want someone darker."

The fact that the Desais were to take over the Street's corner shop made quite a few people groan inwardly. Uh-oh, here come the stock characters, they thought. Hard-working, nice, but vaguely comic. A sort of exotic sideshow.

In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. The family quickly turned out to be personalities in their own right. They commuted from the suburbs. Nita's father Ravi was a business-man with a bank balance to rival wheeler-dealer Mike Baldwin's.

The Desais' respectable, relatively well-off background mirrors Rebecca's own. Her father, Khaleque, was a GP in Halifax, Yorkshire before he retired. Her mother Elizabeth is a children's nurse. They met while working in the same hospital in Nottingham.

"A proper doctor-and-nurse romance," Rebecca says. "Real Mills and Boon stuff."

Her older brother Rashid, 28, is a dentist. In such a medical family, I suggest, she must have spent her childhood breathing Dettol fumes.

"I don't remember that," she laughs. "But one thing I do remember is the phone ringing all the time and my dad having to go out to deal with an emergency. He always seemed to draw the short straw. Every year we'd be sitting down for our Christmas dinner and the phone would ring and by the time Dad got back it was all dried up. He never complained though."

Hard work was a quality that was encouraged above all others. Homework had to be done before anything else; skiving off school was frowned upon. "Sometimes I'd pretend to be ill if I had an exam. `Off you go,' Mum would say. `You can't stay moping around the house.' There's no point in trying to fool a doctor."

She left school with 10 GCSEs and 4 A-levels. By the age of 17, she was at Leeds University studying modern languages.

All this makes her sound very serious, but she has another, playful side. You can see it in the poses she strikes for the camera. There's a depth of passion in Rebecca and it finds expression in her love for flamenco dancing.

"I was in Spain for a year teaching English when I was first entranced by it. I enrolled at a flamenco academy. I was the only English person there. It takes you into another world, where you become someone else, somebody too hot to touch. It's wonderful."

She speaks of it with such joy that at last you understand why she chose to become an actress. It was a slow burn, though; she isn't driven. And she was very nervous on her first day on The Street.

"I was in a sort of panic. I was so plagued by the jitters, I didn't know where I was."

She needn't have worried. "I know it sounds like a cliche, but it really was like joining a family. The cast are like no other people I have ever met. They made me feel at home immediately."

Rebecca quickly made friends with Naomi Radcliffe who plays Alison Webster. "She had only started the week before so we were like allies in a strange country."

Unlike some of the cast who live close to the Granada studios in Manchester, Rebecca commutes between her flat in London and her parents' home in Halifax. "We do all get together for the odd party, but I'm usually somewhere else. If I do go out in Manchester for a drink, it's normally with Chris Bisson, who plays my brother Vikram. We've become great mates. I see him like an extra relative."

Rebecca can still remember the first time she went on stage, when she was five. "We'd gone to see Aladdin. Wishee-Washee was asking for volunteers and my mum took me up. I had to push this enormous drum around. I remember the audience going `Aaah', because the drum was so big and I was so tiny. But when I came off I didn't feel, `This is where I belong'."

It would take another 15 years before Rebecca enrolled in a North London stage school and set sail on her precarious profession. It was not an easy voyage.

"You'd go to an audition, you'd think you'd done OK, you might even get a recall, then... nothing. There were many times I thought I'd made the wrong choice. I kept going because I am stubborn and I was not going to admit defeat."

Typically, she went out and got any job that was going - from stacking crisp boxes in supermarkets to selling light-fittings in the electrical department of a big store. It was there that she met her boyfriend, who unsurprisingly in her United Nations assembly of a life, turns out to be half-English, half-Maltese.

"He came in to buy a lampshade," Rebecca smiles. "And it all started from there."

That was 18 months ago, before the world had heard of her.

"I can't tell you how glad I am it happened then. This business of being recognised, it's a very strange thing. Especially in relationships. I just don't know how I'd get on if someone approached me now. You're never quite sure are you? You don't know if someone likes you for yourself, or just because you're on telly."

You can never be a hundred per cent certain, of course, but I'd be very surprised if Rebecca ever lost the plot in her private life. Fame is unlikely to carry her away. "Showbusiness is lovely," she says. "But it's not brain surgery, is it?"

Article Details

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Title Annotation:	Features
Author:	Wills, Colin
Publication:	Sunday Mirror (London, England)
Date:	Feb 6, 2000
Words:	1560
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