
If you live in the United Kingdom, then there's a good chance you've heard of Paul Chowdhry. He's one of the country's leading stand-up comedians, having appeared on shows such as Live at the Apollo, 8 out of 10 Cats and Taskmaster, and in 2019, he became the first British Asian stand-up to fill the 10,000-seater Wembley Arena on his 'Live Innit' tour. He's also dabbled in acting and has hosted The Paul Chowdhry PudCast since 2021.
If you've seen any of Chowdhry's performances, then you'll know he's mentioned video games in them previously, singling out Street Fighter II as a personal favourite. However, his connection with gaming actually goes even deeper than that – he almost made it a career.
Speaking to Simon Parkin on the My Perfect Console Podcast, Chowdhry reveals that when he was younger, he established his own grey import business from his father's home in Edgware, Greater London. In case you weren't aware, the term 'grey import' applies to any products which have been sourced from outside of the manufacturer's authorised trading channels – and back in the early '90s, that covered a wide range of Japanese systems and games.
"When I was 17, I started a small business where I would import the Super Nintendo from Hong Kong, and would sell them on C&VG," Chowdhry tells Parkin. C&VG – or Computer & Video Games, to give it its full title – was the UK's leading multiformat video game magazine at the time.
"You'd pay £100 per advertisement. I knew that this console – and gaming – was potentially the next big thing. So I imported Super Nintendos and Sega Mega Drives from Hong Kong because they weren't readily available here; Hong Kong used to get consoles quite – well, I don't think it was years, but it was a considerable amount of time before England. So we were quite far behind in the gaming world. I'd spend all my money to import them and then sell them on at a slight profit. I couldn't really afford to even import maybe three consoles at the time, because there were the import duties and taxes."

Chowdhry's company was called Choice Consoles, and yes, we were sad enough to trawl through our archive and locate one of the advertisements, which you can see above.
While Chowdhry insists that his father was supportive of this entrepreneurial venture (and was even the person who got him into gaming by buying a ZX Spectrum), his uncle – the business brains of the family – quickly shot it down.
"My uncle found out I was doing this and said, 'What are you, what are you doing? Wasting your time and money on these games?' He shut the business down. 'Oh, no, just give it back. Sell it. What a waste of time.' My dad was quite supportive, but my uncle was like, 'No, this is rubbish,' but he was a businessman. He just thought I was just talking rubbish. He didn't realize I had this vision here, and now gaming is bigger than Hollywood films."
We have Chowdhry's uncle to thank for his remarkable career in comedy, then – but in some alternate reality, he's the owner of a successful video game import and export business.
[source shows.acast.com]
Comments 9
If its one thing Asian and African kids learn growing up its . . . . . NEVER listen to your uncle!
I wonder if he had anything to do with the import game shop down the road from Edgware? They modded my PAL SNES to do 60hz, and I also bought a Super Wild Card copying device off them.
Maybe his Uncle secretly worked at Nintendo. That’s why he wanted it shut down.
@Guru_Larry How'd that work here in the UK back in the 90s?
@Agent_P For me, it was mostly from adverts in magazines like CVG and Super Play for import games, There was also a stall at Wembley Market that was run by the people who went on to start CEX, and there was also a game shop in St. Albans called Software First I bought my Japanese Mega Drive from with a copy of ESWAT and New Zealand Story.
Remember the guy who ran it even, big guy called Chris.
CEX did open up a game shop in Harrow, their second r third store, they were all about import games then. remember them selling Mario Kart 64 for £150.
@Guru_Larry Yeah, but our tellies were 50Hz, so how’d the SNESes work?
@Agent_P A lot of import stores modded Japanese/American consoles to accept PAL.
Most machines were both PAL and NTSC inside, one size fits all, you just needed to bridge the connector to change them.
That and a lot of TV's were also both PAL and NTSC in the UK.
@Guru_Larry Neat! Thanks for the insight!
@Agent_P No Worries, I also bought a VHS player that could play NTSC videos and convert them on the fly to a PAL TV, (was into anime back then) and ran a few consoles through that!
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