It’s a very cosy setting, a desk and a chair facing a window that opens into the charming backyard of a house in a village. No wonder that Lambodaran, that smart young man with a strange beard, wanted to sit there and write poetry on nights he couldn’t sleep. Back in the early 1990s when the Internet was still a few years away and telephones only rang noisily on front-room table-tops, Lambodaran loved to write, recite and sing poetry every time he met someone, especially when it was someone pretty and young.
Television viewers in those days had only Doordarshan (DD) and they embraced the story of Lambodaran, broadcast as a telefilm on the DD Malayalam channel. Lambo was new, unlike the regular 13-episode serials or the more serious telefilms. The hero was funny, full of himself and absolutely flawed. In other words, he was likeable.
More than 29 years later, Lambo is once again out there, uploaded on DD Malayalam’s YouTube channel. The 100 odd comments on the video suggest how much people had adored the film back then and still have nostalgic feelings about.
“The wait is over ! A favourite ..Premkumar was terrific as lambo (sic),” a user commented.
Prem Kumar indeed was terrific. He went on to win the state award for best television actor in 1993 for his role as Lambodaran. He then slipped into movies, doing many memorable comic characters and the occasional serious ones.
Speaking to TNM, Prem Kumar recalls, “It was first telecast as a New Year’s programme by DD in 1991. A little more than an hour, Lambo was novel in many ways – the way it was presented as a 70-year-old’s memories of his younger days, the comical hero and so on. Nambeesan sir, who was a senior photographer in DD and brother-in-law of filmmaker Harihararan, directed it. He scripted it based on a story by KS Krishnan.”
For a long time, people continued to call him Lambo, the role they just couldn’t forget. If you watch Lambo now, you may not laugh like you once did or for the same reasons. Three decades can change your perception about a lot of things, comedy included. But you can still see why Lambo worked, why it charmed a generation of television viewers.
Lambodaran is, when the film begins, an established old poet, attending an interview by Shashankan (Ravi Vallathol). The wife (Lathika) looks shyly from behind the curtains when Lambo tells the interviewer of their old love, a time when they used to stand on either side of a window. Lalitha was a domestic worker who used to help his mother (Mavelikkara Ponnamma), and the latter seemed to believe everything her weirdo son told her.
Mavelikkara Ponnamma and Narayanan as Lambo's parents
Lambodaran – who liked to be called Lambo – has failed his Class 10 exams several years in a row and this has upset his dad (Narayanan), a policeman who is due to retire in two years. Who will bring rice to the table, his dad asks his wife who seems disinterested. Achan does not understand him, Lambo says. Their paths are parallel, they can never meet. But Lambo does take that year’s exams seriously, laboriously pasting answers of possible questions all over his upper body. “This is for 10 marks, this for 20,” he tells his bewildered mother.
“It was all recorded on the spot, there was no dubbing. So it would feel all the more natural. Sound Engineer Das sir made sure that there was no external noise,” Prem Kumar says.
The comedy would often come from the seriousness with which he delivers his dialogue. He doesn’t mean to be funny. He just says his lines and erupts into song every few minutes. To a lovesick Lalitha, it feels romantic, no matter that the poems are often rip-offs of film songs. Their love exchanges sometimes become nauseatingly cheesy and you’re not sure if it is satirical or not, because the rest of Lambo goes beyond many stereotypes of the time.
Lathika and Prem Kumar played lovers in Lambo
“It was a satire of sorts. We used to improvise a lot on the sets, sometimes including contemporary events into the dialogue. There’s a line I say about refusing an award that I’d get – it’s based on a real-life incident of a poet refusing the award,” Prem Kumar recalls.
That's the kind of thing Lambo would do - refuse an award. He thinks highly of himself. Several times during the present-day interview, he not only welcomes all of Shashankan’s praises but adds to it. “He is someone who thinks of himself as a great poet,” says the actor who played the character.
Lambo has other issues. He sounds casteist when he raises the issue of caste difference with his girlfriend, due to which he says they can’t be together. Here, his mother surprises you by brushing aside such petty things as caste and religion coming in the way of love. “I don’t care about all that,” she says, “but I don’t express it, maybe because I’m not so educated.”
Wow, a middle-aged woman from 30 years ago, uneducated, living in a village, thinking more progressively than her so-called poet son! Nambeesan deserves credit for creating that character at the most unexpected place. But then it is from the villages of Kerala that women rose to rebellion once upon a time.
You don’t, however, hold it against Lambo because nothing that he says can be taken too seriously. His mind drifts from one random poem to another, everything else appears to hold little interest for him. You get this when he finally has a job with the police force – and sticks to it for all of one-and-a-half months.
The best part of the film comes towards that last half when Lambo works as a police constable. He has of course no interest in the job and, at the slightest provocation, recites poetry. The Sub Inspector (Gilbert) has enough of him when Lambo for no earthly reason breaks into song just as they close in on a sleeping suspect, who jumps up awake and escapes.
Leaving the police force all too happily, Lambo makes his grand exit with the ‘Vida’ song that had become very popular back in the 1990s. “Ee thokkinum vida,” (Goodbye to this gun), he recites looking at the rifle in the station and bids adieu to one and all.
In that final exit, Lambo becomes all the more adorable with his enormous pride and all too big head. No wonder that Prem Kumar got the state television award the year it was instituted. Renowned director KG George was the jury chairman who chose to give the award for a character that was so laced with humour.
Despite the years that have passed and the changes of perception you might have had, Lambo can still make you laugh, either for the adorably honest and totally immodest poet of a man, or for the memories of a younger self who once held him dear.
“It makes me happy that people still laugh for Lambo and remember it so fondly. It’s what brought me to cinema and to comedy. Interestingly, I did a feature film before Lambo – Sakhavu Krishna Pillai directed by PA Backer, where I play the Communist revolutionary. It was a very serious character, the opposite of Lambo. But the film didn’t release for various reasons. If it did, my fate too might have been different,” Prem Kumar says.
Watch: Lambo, the telefilm