People Just Do Nothing

People Just Do Nothing is a British television mockumentary sitcom, created and performed by Allan "Seapa" Mustafa, Steve Stamp, Asim Chaudhry and Hugo Chegwin.
The programme follows the lives of MC Grindah, DJ Beats and their friends, who run Kurupt FM, a pirate radio station broadcasting UK garage and drum and bass music from Brentford in West London.
The programme originally began as a series of online shorts that became popular enough that the group were asked to make a pilot episode for BBC3's Comedy Feeds. The first series was released on BBC Three in July 2014, with the fifth and final series airing on BBC Two in 2018. A film continuation, People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan, was released in August 2021.
In 2017, the show won the BAFTA award and Royal Television Society award for Best Scripted Comedy. Many of the actors in the show have gone on to tour as a musical act, in character as their personas from Kurupt FM.
People Just Do Nothing is a mockumentary, in which the characters give interviews to the camera and are taped in a loose, documentary fashion. An off-screen interviewer is occasionally heard. The "documentary" follows the fortunes of "Kurupt FM", a pirate radio station broadcasting UK garage music from a flat in Brentford, West London.
The main characters are MC Grindah, DJ Beats, DJ Steves, DJ Decoy and their entrepreneurial manager, Chabuddy G. The show follows their personal lives, with a strong focus on their relationships with their respective female partners such as Miche and Roche.
All of the characters have an inflated sense of their own talent and success; Steve Stamp, who portrays Steves, said "A lot of talented people don’t have enough confidence, but then there’s a lot of stupid people with no talent who have loads of confidence ... All our characters are super confident; they’re just not good at what they do." The characters fail to recognise their lowly status, with Grindah regularly making comments like "We're going global, but you will very much have to be in the Brentford area to hear us." The show plays off their stupidity; Rachel Aroesti of The Guardian has said, "Every character is really, quite comfortingly, dense, and their inability to read scenarios correctly is the source of nearly all the comedy." The show was summarised by Jamie Clifton of Vice as:
The five main actors were friends for years before they began making the show. Hugo Chegwin had known Steve Stamp since childhood, became friends with Asim Chaudhry at college, and met Allan Mustafa through a mutual friend. Chegwin, Chaudhry and Mustafa would go on to work in a call centre with Dan Sylvester. They all had experience DJing or MCing on pirate radio in their youth, and no ambition to be actors. Mustafa said, "I rapped at the time, but we never really ended up making music. We just watched The Office a lot and smoked weed." In the late 2000s, Chegwin and Stamp had a "fake garage crew" on a real station called KuruptFM. Chegwin and Mustafa began creating characters and filming them, and were further inspired when they watched the BBC documentary series Tower Block Dreams, about London and Essex's underground music scene, and found the participants amusing. MC Grindah was based on a pirate radio boss from the series. Stamp and Chaudhry became involved, and the foursome began improvising material and putting it on YouTube under the name "Wasteman TV".
The YouTube videos were seen by producer Jon Petrie, who worked with Ash Atalla at Roughcut TV. Petrie later explained, "It wasn't fully-formed, but the more you watched it, the more you could see there was proper detail to the characters. I had no idea about garage, really, but I just loved them as comic creations." Atalla arranged to produce a pilot episode for BBC Three, released in August 2012. The pilot was the most shared video on iPlayer that month, and the BBC ordered a full series.
Many journalists have commented that the show is heavily influenced by The Office. David Renshaw has said, "At times, Grindah’s delusion in relation to his own success, talent and likeability is a mortifying dance away from full David Brent." Chabuddy G has been described as "an Asian Del Boy", of Only Fools and Horses. The actors have named their primary influences as The Office, This Is Spinal Tap, Alan Partridge, Ali G, Laurel and Hardy, and Mike Leigh.
Writing credits go to Allan Mustafa and Steve Stamp, but the cast are given freedom to improvise their dialogue and sometimes film scenes spontaneously. By the third series, Mustafa estimated that material was "70/30 percent improvised". Chaudhry explained, "When you've been doing a character for six years, you can just snap into it – you know how they'd react in any situation", adding that he is continuously inspired by his father, "because he's like a real Chabuddy G, just not as ridiculous". The dialogue is often heavy with 21st century London slang. Much of the filming took place at Chesterton Court on the South Acton housing estate, before it was demolished. Series three was shot in Peckham, south-east London. All locations are based on the Haverfield Estate in Brentford, where Chegwin and Stamp grew up.
People Just Do Nothing has received positive reviews. After the release of the first series, Alex Fletcher of Digital Spy called it "the best British comedy in years", and lamented that few people were aware of its "comedic genius". He added, "it packs in more genuine belly laughs in one episode than most recent sitcoms have done in their full lifetime, and [has] nailed that quintessential British sense of humour where we're able to laugh at our own humiliating inadequacies ... it feels like it belongs in the company of modern comedy greats such as The Office, Peep Show and Phoenix Nights." Gerard O'Donovan of The Telegraph gave the pilot episode four stars out of five, and said, "Entertaining, and absolutely of its time, People Just Do Nothing certainly serves up some good laughs and I look forward to the next three parts."
For the second series, David Renshaw of The Guardian said it was "a welcome return from the gang", and commented "Despite its larger-than-life characters, People Just Do Nothing’s success lies in its believability ... You get the feeling that if you drove out to Brentford you might actually run in to them." He especially praised the comedy provided by DJ Steves and Chabuddy G. Rachel Aroesti, also of The Guardian, said "the episode where Grindah panics after taking a pill at his club night has good claim to be the comic highlight of 2015".
Aroesti gave the third series a highly positive review: "In an age of bleak comedy that barely makes you snigger, one show has been keeping up the lost art of making people laugh – the hilarious, half-witted pirate radio mockumentary." She added, "[the show] is not an old-fashioned sitcom by any stretch – it’s understated, meta and set in a niche subculture – but it is truly traditional in its comedy: beats are hit and joke quotas filled, scene in, scene out." She appreciated that the series also "decided to go for the dramatic jugular. The final episode of this series offered fans a precious opportunity to laugh and cry at exactly the same time ... By making you care about the characters (even the monstrosity that is MC Grindah – a David Brent with malicious intent), viewers will now have two reasons for tuning in."
The show started life in 2010 as "Wasteman TV", a YouTube series that was filmed and edited by Asim Chaudhry (Chabuddy G) before the BBC commissioned a pilot on 17 August 2012, which became the most shared iPlayer show for the month. A four-part series was eventually commissioned, which first aired on iPlayer in July 2014, then on terrestrial television the following month. A second series, of five episodes, aired in July 2015.
In October 2015, the BBC announced it had commissioned a third and fourth series of People Just Do Nothing, both consisting of six 30-minute episodes. The BBC confirmed Series 3 & 4 would initially be available on the new online BBC Three and later screened on BBC Two.
Episode one of series three premiered on BBC iPlayer on 17 August 2016. Episodes of series three were released weekly on iPlayer and then broadcast the following week on BBC Two. Series four began on iPlayer on 15 August 2017, and was also broadcast on BBC One on Saturday evenings.
In Australia, the series premiered on 12 August 2015 on Channel [V]. In the US, the show premiered on Viceland on 2 February 2017. The show was also added to Netflix US in May 2017. In Canada, the show premiered on CBC Gem on January 14, 2022.
In 2018, Amazon ordered a pilot episode for a U.S remake of the series, set in Las Vegas around a DJ crew called 'Whet Desert' In 2020 it was announced that the project would not be going forward.
The DVD of the first three series was released in November 2016. The boxset included specially recorded commentaries from the first two series and unseen extra footage.
The four main actors, along with "Decoy" and "Fantasy", tour nightclubs and music venues as "Kurupt FM", where they appear in character. They have also played music festivals including Glastonbury and Reading and Leeds. Mustafa said in 2016, "We all wanted to be musicians when we were younger. So now, in a way, it's like we're living out what we didn't get to do, playing all these festivals. We get two sick jobs: we get to film and we get to fuck around on stage and be headliners." Stamp added, "And because we're in character, we can sort of get away with whatever. Like my shit mixing; it's because I'm Steves, not because I'm a shit DJ." On-stage guests have included artists Stormzy and Big Narstie.
On 22 April 2022 "Kurupt FM" released a live concert stream of their sold-out performance at Printworks, London. The 90 minute show was made available to watch on demand for 2 years by streaming service On Air.
It was announced that a film adaptation, directed by TV-show-director Jack Clough, would be produced, with filming on location in Japan. The film was released in the UK, with a 15 certificate, on 18 August 2021, to a largely positive reception by the public. Film critics were less appreciative. Kevin Maher of The Times gave the film 2/5 and was concerned about the Japanese stereotypes — "Eventually it starts to feel like lowest-common-denominator humour". The Guardian gave it 3 out 5 commenting "The result is an amiable if unambitious showbiz satire, somewhere between The Office and Spinal Tap although not as groundbreaking as either". Bob Mann of One Mann's Movies reflected the views of someone who has not seen the TV version, something that he comments will be key to the box office success of the movie. Giving the movie 3.5 out of 5, he commented that "as a PJDN virgin, I still laughed a lot!".
The show's creators have also released music in character as Kurupt FM to coincide with the show.
In May 2017, grime artist Grim Sickers released an 'All Star Remix' of his song "Kane", featuring guest verses from Kurupt FM, Jaykae, Funky Dee, President T and P Money. Kurupt FM also appear in the music video.
On 17 November 2017, Kurupt FM released The Lost Tape on XL Recordings, a mixtape featuring the group performing over classic UK garage productions. The mixtape spawned two singles: "Suttin Like That" and "It's a Kuruption Ting", a collaboration with Scott Garcia. The Lost Tape was also released with a companion mockumentary film on Vice, featuring guest appearances from Craig David, Mike Skinner and P Money.
In 2020, Asim Chaudhry released a single titled "Rig Doctor" in character as Chabuddy G. The song was originally released on Chaudhry's YouTube page in 2014. Chabuddy G has also appeared on albums by Big Narstie and Riz Ahmed.
On 20 August 2021, the group released their debut album The Greatest Hits (Part 1) following the release of their film Big in Japan earlier in the week. The release of the lead single "Summertime", featuring Craig David, preceded the record in May 2021. The album is referenced in the film and features collaborations with Mist, Jaykae, D Double E and General Levy, amongst others.
The Greatest Hits (Part 1) reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart.