There’s something to these People Who Just Do Nothing
The best thing about Kurupting the Industry: The People Just Do Nothing Story (BBC Three) was that it made me want to rewatch People Just Do Nothing. Very often “story of ” biopics about garlanded TV comedies are pointless love-ins that end up diluting your affection for a show you’d once enjoyed. This one did have a point – it has, quite shamelessly, been produced to promote a PJDN film, which by coincidence premieres in all good cinemas next week.
But there was just something so unlikely about how a group of tracksuited stoner DJS from Brentford came to make a Bafta-winning comedy about a group of tracksuited stoner DJS from Brentford. In fact, I’d venture that you’d have enjoyed The People Just Do Nothing Story even if you’d never watched an episode, never heard of spoof pirate-radio station Kurupt FM or its manager, Chabuddy G.
For one thing, it offered hope to all of those people out there doing nothing who reckon that they and their mates could, in the right circumstances and with a tail wind, be quite funny. Allan Mustafa, Asim Chaudhry, Hugo Chegwin and Steve Stamp began as a group of friends who loved Mcing, UK Garage and pirate
radio. As a result, when they filmed a few clips of themselves pratting about as spoof Garage MCS and stuck it on Youtube, many people thought it was real. That is the root of a lot of great comedy – it’s very close to the truth.
“You have to love something – that’s when you can take the piss out of it,” said talking head Martin Freeman, in a typically astute remark. The Kurupt team, as the film showed, would quite likely have ended up running something similar to Kurupt FM if they hadn’t alchemised the base metal of the Brentford garage scene into comedy gold. One early story told of how they turned up ready to shoot the pilot with no script, and no idea that you needed a script either. They knew the world they were about to recreate so well that they didn’t need one.
Speaking of Martin Freeman, talking heads in clip shows like this one are frequently derided, but here they were well used. Freeman, clearly, was a diehard fan; what’s more he had worked on The Office, a major PJDN influence, so he was exactly the right person to hold forth. Dizzee Rascal and Kurupt FM collaborator Craig David were also clever choices: it was Rascal who said that People Just Do Nothing was “like Spinal Tap for our culture”. There can be no higher praise.
E
ight series of Fake or Fortune?
(BBC One) and the presenters have evidently realised what the viewers worked out long ago: this is not an art attribution show, it’s television’s most gripping detective drama. How else to explain Fiona Bruce’s repeated exclamations in last night’s episode that: “We need a body!”
I’m not sure quite what she meant in an art world context but it provided some insight into the way Fake or Fortune? is heading. Soon, Bruce will be revealed to be a damned good art detective but a damned bad mother, because she’s wedded to the job and some past trauma has left her scarred. Philip Mould, the art dealer who is Bruce’s willing sidekick, will get his own spin-off show set in the seedy world of high-value phone auctions – “Mould to the Highest Bidder”.
Not that Fake or Fortune? really needs to move on or change much at all. It has reached that point some TV series do when presenters, producers and the format they have concocted reach a peak of refinement and the whole thing just works. Last night’s investigation into a possible Edwin Landseer, one of the best Victorian animal artists whose lion sculptures adorn Trafalgar Square, could hardly have been better scripted. As with Who Do You Think You Are? the simple pulling and pulling at a thread, following clues and archive sources all the way to the truth, was riveting
The putative discovery, Time of War,
had been “lost” in the Thames flood of 1928, in which hundreds of national treasures were damaged in the lower galleries of the Tate. If this was that painting, it would be worth £80,000.
Off we gambolled, then, along a path that included the usual, fascinating forensic investigation, a lot of swiping on giant screens and a brilliant piece of exegesis from Mould comparing the brushwork and composition of our discovery with a confirmed Landseer.
Even the obvious contrivances (such as an X Factor-esque big reveal with the answer pulled from an envelope) were effective. Inspector Bruce wanted answers, and goddamit, if she wasn’t going to get ’em.
Kurupting the Industry: The People Just Do Nothing Story ★★★★
Fake or Fortune? ★★★★