In the end, her family accepts that they're now dealing with Ranjit's family for the purposes of matrimony and Scotland is forgiven and forgotten. When most Western girls would be aiming tentatively at a first date, Oberjit almost immediately proposes. She wants to marry for love, apparently, but she wants it semi-arranged. It's a determined juggling act - of two opposed philosophies. Ranjit is a little dumbstruck, but compliant.None the less, Oberjit is unable to get out of the trip to Glasgow. The whole family (apart from the 83-year-old uncle who only likes to garden and pay the milkman) haul ass up to Scotland to meet the incredibly handsome alternative suitor, and return home bearing all sorts of grudges about Oberjit's refusal to marry him.

All she knows about him is that he's over six feet tall, as she requested, and lives in Glasgow which seems to her very far away. Her jitters solidify into an infatuation with another Sikh, named Ranjit, who's caught her eye. Using a friend and Ranjit's enthusiastic sister as go-betweens, she eventually manages to talk to him on the phone. The suitability of her possible partners seemed a matter of pure guesswork. Oberjit, a 19-year-old Sikh who lives in Slough, has her own idea of where one culture ends and the other begins. She's moulded the custom of arranged marriage to fit in with her own arrangements.

Having impulsively asked her parents to find her a husband, she has her doubts about their choice. Our current neglect of traditional family values probably owes more to the invention of central heating than we think. And who needs a husband when you can buy an electric blanket?Another arranged marriage that gave me pause this week was Oberjit Brar's in Suitable Boy (Video Diaries, BBC2). Has he never considered understatement? But when George writes to his first (secret) wife, Grant's face becomes believably pale and puffy, the face of a wastrel that's spent too much time in poorly heated palaces He needs a wife - to warm up the bed. He has two modes of behaviour: Oblomovian torpor or vehement expenses of spirit in a waste of shame. In particular, I want to be assured that you will never again, not even in the event of the death of our daughter, make any attempt to produce another heir." His reply: "In the event of any accident happening to my daughter, I shall not infringe the terms of restriction by purposing at any period a connection of a more particular nature." Phew! It would all be terribly suburban - if he didn't sound so much like Mr Darcy at a low ebb.Richard E Grant, as George, seemed to be trying to compensate for the deficiencies of the script by tireless over- acting. Caroline, at first aggrieved but still tender, soon adopted George's chilly tone: "Sir, I wish to know the exact terms on which we are in future to live.