EASTENDERS fans were left stunned when Deepak Verma popped up on BBC News – after a reporter failed to recognise they were speaking to none other than Albert Square loverman Sanjay Kapoor.
The 50-year-old actor, a fixture on the soap throughout the 90s as smooth-talking Sanjay, was collared by a news crew as he went for a walk on a deserted beach in Hastings.
Speaking about the government lockdown, Deepak explained, with a theatrical wave of his arm: “It’s all just empty, it’s like The Walking Dead. All the restaurants are all closed.”
Deepak’s apperance on the 10 o’clock news didn’t escape viewers, with one tweeting: “Was that Sanjay off Eastenders on the BBC news?”
Another referred to his permanently furious former screen wife, joking: “I bet Gita was just off screen getting irritated with him.”
Reporter Dan Johnson joked about his run-in with soap royalty, writing: “On a bizarre day in an upside down world, accidentally interviewing Sanjay from Eastenders for the news wasn’t the strangest thing that happened.”
He later added: “As if I was going to say ‘and now the thoughts of Sanjay off of Eastenders’. Then played the doof, doof doof doof bit after him.”
Sanjay and Gita, who can currently be seen in classic EastEnders re-runs, arrived when she was heavily pregnant with their daughter Sharmilla at the start of 1993.
They had a fractious relationship, with Gita finding slippery Sanjay in bed with her sister Meena, later admitting he’d been having sex with her four times a week for months.
The couple reconciled, but ended up leaving Albert Square for good in September 1998 after scandalous stories about them emerged in the Walford Gazette.
