Asim Chaudhry

Interview: Kurupt FM's message to Trump

The cast of BBC Three's mockumentary series People Just Do Nothing - MC Grindah, Steves and Chabuddy G - tell Kate Hutchinson about the future of UK nightlife; the closure of Fabric nightclub; their relationship with Craig David; and their personal message to Donald Trump.

On set with MC Grindah & Brentford's garage crew

In a south London warehouse, MC Grindah, head honcho of Brentford's premier garage and drum 'n' bass pirate radio station Kurupt FM, is sneeringly impersonating his side-kick DJ Beats' interest in his girlfriend's foetal scan.

Radio Times review

Whatever you think of the Knight Rider and Baywatch star, beacon of freedom and inspiration for the end of the Cold War David Hasselhoff, there's no doubting that he's a good sport.

Dave's excellent spoof documentary imagines "The Hoff" down on his luck and keen to kickstart his career in England. At Stansted airport he's greeted by superfan mini-cab driver (the excellent Asim Chaudhry) and an inept, inexperienced assistant, and taken to a rundown hotel. And the fun starts.

No subject or humiliation is off limits as he's forced to compete with a dwarf actor for the role of himself. He's then forced to watch a show-off LA luvvie getting praise for doing a better Michael Knight than the man who played him for 98 hours in the hit 80s drama. Exquisite.

Just when you think the whole comedy documentary format has had every last laugh wrung out of it, along comes BBC3's People Just Do Nothing with a take that is fresh, original and very funny.

The four-part series centres upon Kurupt FM, "the biggest and baddest pirate station in the land", operating out of a high-rise council flat in Brentford, west London, and broadcasting all the way to Shepherd's Bush, west London, where it dissolves into white noise.

The station's leader is garage "legend" MC Grindah (Allan Mustafa), a man whose self-importance is in inverse proportion to his self-awareness. Like all the best comedy monsters, Grindah is a combination of the desperately pitiful and the truly appalling, a strutting motormouth forever spewing cliches, bombast and delusion to anybody stupid enough to listen. This is largely limited to his mate and co-presenter DJ Beats (Hugo Chegwin), cronies Decoy and Steves (Dan Sylvester Woolford and Steve Stamp), local entrepreneur Chabuddy G (Asim Chaudhry) and, further fanning the flames of Grindah's rampant ego, an off-screen BBC documentary team earnestly trying to capture the authentic voice of the streets.

We also get to meet Grindah's girlfriend Miche (Lily Brazier), whose epically inane ramblings include the dismissal of her boyfriend's criminal convictions as "silly little things, like GBH and hate crime".

Episode one saw Kurupt FM trying to soundproof their walls with egg boxes following threats from a neighbour to report them to the council. Grindah is alert to the danger such an eventuality poses to both the station's secret location and their very existence as musical outlaws. "The government works for the council," he explains to his equally dim cohorts.

The set-up is original, the execution clever, the characters rich and the acting superb. From many wonderful moments, my favourite has to be Chabuddy G proudly showing off his latest money-making scheme: bags of peanut dust, everybody's favourite when all the peanuts have gone.