Allan ‘Seapa’ Mustafa, co-creator/co-writer, plays Grindah
I met Hugo Chegwin, who plays Beats, at university. I used to rap and he made beats. We were watching documentaries that weren’t meant to be funny but had amazing characters, as well as things like The Office, Peep Show and Alan Partridge. Instead of studying we would film ourselves doing prank calls in silly voices in his bedroom just to make each other laugh.
Hugo’s best mate from school – Steve Stamp, who plays Steves – was travelling the world and stopping in Thailand for a month. It was halfway through the term but we weren’t really going to classes because we were smoking a lot of weed. I said to my mum: “I really need to go to Thailand. I can use my student loan money and I swear when I come back everything will be fine.” Obviously, I was lying. I just wanted to go on holiday.
The three of us immediately became comedy soulmates. We’d go up to all these hippies on the beach, pretending we were on pills and say: “Yeah, wild wave, man.” And they’d go, “Yeah, dude”, and hug us – but the joke was always on us not them.
Steve was studying English literature and had a dream to write. He said: “We should do something when we get back to the UK.” Our friend Asim Chaudhry, who plays Chabuddy G, had a video camera so became the cameraman. We filmed improv in Hugo’s bedroom. There was no plan. We said: “Let’s just pretend to make a shit beat.”
I’d grown up around the working-class rude-boy culture of the male bravado, faux aggression and arrogance, and was still trying to make it as a serious rapper. Doing rap in a comedic way gave me freedom, although I was worried it meant that no one would take my rap seriously.
It took us two years to do five episodes that we posted on YouTube. Maybe a few students and musicians watched us. Then we got an email from [TV production company] Rough Cut, inviting us to a meeting with Ash Atalla who’d seen what we had posted. We thought, “They’re probably going to try and change it”, and turned up in tracksuits. When Ash said, “I produced The Office”, we thought we’d better take things more seriously.
He got us a pilot. Everything we’d done was improv, so we said: “Can we just turn up and fuck about?” He said: “No way. The BBC are investing in you. You need to learn how to write a script.” It took us seven months and 20 drafts.
My character was originally called Sniper, but there is an actual [Korean] MC called MC Sniper, so I chose Grindah because I’d already written loads of lyrics with Sniper and Grindah sort of rhymed. Kurupt FM was a pirate station I used to be on back in Kingston, London, where I grew up. Steve had a little pad he’d doodle on in meetings, and sketched a backwards Nike tick with “just do nothing” instead of “just do it”. That became People Just Do Nothing because the characters are so self-obsessed with this big vision of themselves, but literally just do nothing.
Steve Stamp, co-creator/co-writer, plays Steves
I’d grown up listening to pirate radio and garage. We would DJ and MC over old-school garage in Hugo’s bedroom. We had a Myspace page with a spoof garage crew called Blazin’ Unit – an early iteration of Kurupt FM – that tapped into how over the top these garage MCs sounded with so much repetition – “selecta, selecta” – that didn’t really make sense. We were fans of [BBC3 documentary] Tower Block Dreams that investigated the music scene on council estates.
I’d done a short film and directed a music video to demonstrate that I could turn my creative juices into some sort of career, but instead I ended up working as an admin assistant in the adult social care department in the local council, which wasn’t great. Eventually I managed to save up enough money to go travelling.
It was difficult to manage the writing with us all talking over each other in a room, so Seapa and I became lead scriptwriters. Everybody was a different level of showoff, which defined the hierarchy of who was on camera the most. When performing, Seapa can be overbearing and intense, so his character had to do the most talking. I’d sit in the background semi-directing, with my character slumped in the corner. In the pilot we wanted to recreate the lo-fi mock-doc style from our YouTube series, but it looked like a cool modern documentary. For the series, we went against the idea of trying to make something that looked nice.
When the show came to an end after five series, we weren’t keen to do a film. It felt weird to do this huge goodbye then immediately come back. But we came up with this idea of them having success in Japan, so they were actually famous instead of having this delusion of fame. It mimicked what was happening to us in our real lives. Again, it was about writing about what you know, with a new angle that didn’t feel forced or contrived.
Performing live as Kurupt FM has been a strange cheat code into the music industry. We wanted to make it more of a party, less of a comedy performance. We were out of our depth at first, but now we’re quite a polished act.
You’re definitely going to see us doing stuff together because these are the funniest people I grew up with. There’s nothing we couldn’t do as a collective. Like Wu-Tang, we’re strongest together.