Romesh Ranganathan

Ranganathan performing at the British Summer Time festival in 2015

Ranganathan started performing as a comedian whilst working as a mathematics teacher.[10] He started presenting Newsjack on Radio 4 Extra in March 2014.[11] He appeared on The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice in 2014, during which he presented his homemade vegan chocolate brownies.

Ranganathan has been a guest on several episodes of 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.[12] He also has appeared on Would I Lie to You?, Holby City, Soccer AM, Russell Howard's Good News, Sweat the Small Stuff, The Last Leg, Virtually Famous, Have I Got News for You, QI, and Mock the Week. He was a contestant on the first series of Taskmaster and also appeared in the third episode of Jon Richardson Grows Up. He also performed at The Royal Variety Performance in 2015. In 2015, he presented a series for BBC Three, Asian Provocateur, in which he travelled to Sri Lanka to explore his ancestral country.[13] In October 2016, the second travel series was aired in which Ranganathan and his mother travel to North America to meet more of his relatives.

Ranganathan also joined The Apprentice: You're Fired! in 2015 as a regular panellist. The show is a spin-off from The Apprentice. In December 2015, he appeared in Josh Widdicombe's sitcom, Josh. In 2016, he co-presented It's Not Rocket Science, a new entertainment series for ITV, alongside Ben Miller and Rachel Riley. In 2017, he became the eleventh co-presenter to John Lloyd on the BBC Radio series, The Museum of Curiosity.

In 2018, Ranganathan joined Season 13 of A League of Their Own;[14] starred in his own 10-episode docu-comedy called Just Another Immigrant that premiered on Showtime June 8,[15] and presented Judge Romesh, an unscripted television show in which he decides the outcome of court cases between a claimant and a defendant. He also starred in his own series ‘The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan’ where he travelled to rarely visited locations around the globe, with subsequent series aired in 2019 and 2020.

Ranganathan's autobiography, Straight Outta Crawley, was published in 2018.[16]

Ranganathan was born in Crawley, West Sussex, to Sri Lankan Tamil parents.[17] He has a younger brother, Dinesh, and was raised in the Hindu faith. He suffers from a right-sided ptosis, which caused lazy eye as a child.[18]

Ranganathan studied mathematics at Birkbeck College, University of London.[19] He taught mathematics at Hazelwick School in Crawley, and The Beacon School, Banstead, Surrey,[10] and was a freestyle rapper under the rap name "Ranga", once reaching the finals of the UK freestyle competition.[20] Ranganathan became a professional comedian in 2012.

Ranganathan is vegan, having been vegetarian up until 2013.[21][22][23] He is a supporter of Arsenal FC.[24]

His first name, stated on Ranganathan’s birth certificate, is Jonathan. Romesh is his middle name. He did not find this out until he started school. During his live show, Irrational, Ranganathan recalled that his parents explained to him that this was because they were concerned his name would otherwise sound too ‘ethnic’ when applying for jobs as an adult.[25]

He is married, has three sons,[26] and lives in Crawley.[27] He and his wife Leesa first met when they were both working at Hazelwick School, where she was a drama teacher.[28]

He stated that he got obsessed with getting tattooed and subsequently has tattoos with the names of his sons, Richard Pryor, Nas, the Roots and the Transformers’ Autobot logo on his body.[29]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Romesh Ranganathan.

• Romesh Ranganathan – official site
• Romesh Ranganathan at IMDb 
• Romesh Ranganathan on Instagram - Instagram