British Comedy Guide
Sneakerhead. Russell (Hugo Chegwin)
Hugo Chegwin

Hugo Chegwin

  • Actor, writer and composer

Press clippings Page 6

Review: People Just Do Nothing, BBC Three/BBC One

Pirate radio station Kurupt FM is back - hurrah - but it has a rival - hiss.

Bruce Dessau, Beyond The Joke, 16th August 2017

Interview: DJ Beats on the stress of being a dad

Kurupt FM star DJ Beats says becoming a dad for the first time has had a seriously bad effect on his health.

Sarah Deen, Metro, 14th August 2017

BAFTA Awards 2017 - Comedy Winners

The results of the BAFTA Television awards have been announced at a ceremony in London. The comedy-related winners are People Just Do Nothing, Michael McIntyre, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Steve Coogan and Charlie Brooker's Year Wipe. Ab Fab star Joanna Lumley picked up a special award.

British Comedy Guide, 14th May 2017

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.

John Hind, i Newspaper, 18th August 2016

The first episode in the second series for the hit, west London-based mockumentary following pirate radio proprietors and all-round incompetents MC Grindah and DJ Beats (Allan Mustafa and Hugo Chegwin). Idiocy ensues as Grindah prepares for daughter Angel's "christianing", enlisting the help of jack-of-all-trades Chabuddy G and the drug-addled Steves. Meanwhile, Beats is on a mission to prove that he would make the ideal godfather. Fresh, farcical comedy with a soft spot for suburban loserdom.

Hannah J Davies, The Guardian, 15th July 2015

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.

Harry Venning, The Stage, 23rd July 2014

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