People Just Do Nothing’s Allan Mustafa: ‘Everything I did, I failed at – but it was necessary’

I remember my mum saying, ‘You’ve turned into the devil,’” recalls Allan Mustafa, the star and co-creator of People Just Do Nothing, of his wild teenage years. “I wasn’t that bad,” he clarifies. “But I never achieved anything. It was just a lot of weed smoking, graffiti, part-time jobs, pirate radio, getting arrested... That was literally my upbringing.” If Satan did indeed have a hold on him, it was comedy that offered his salvation. As he grew out of his meandering boyhood, Mustafa found inspiration in the classics of modern British comedy: The Office; Peep Show; Partridge. Before long, he was fronting an acclaimed comedy of his own, which has by now become a phenomenon.

People Just Do Nothing started out as a run of self-made improvised internet skits, created by Mustafa and his friends Hugo Chegwin, Steve Stamp and Asim Chaudhry, about a hopeless group of pirate radio DJs based in Brentford, west London, with ambitions to be rich and famous. It was picked up by the BBC in 2014, running for five seasons and winning a Bafta before bowing out in 2018 as the crew fashioned themselves into a touring live act. Now, they’re back with a feature film, Big in Japan, which sets the doltish Kurupt FM garage artists “MC Grindah” (Mustafa), “Beats” (Chegwin), “Steves” (Stamp), “Decoy” (Dan Sylvester) and manager “Chabuddy G” (Chaudhry) on a path to pseudo-stardom in Tokyo.

Speaking to Mustafa, over Zoom, sometimes feels a lot like speaking to David Brent. People Just Do Nothing has earned countless comparisons to The Office, for both its fly-on-the-wall faux-documentary format and its style of humour, a realistic character-based comedy where the laughs are often derived from misplaced hubris. There’s more than a little Brent in nearly all of the characters, though it is Grindah who’s the closest analogue. Like so many die-hard fans of Ricky Gervais’s series, Mustafa lets the rhythms and cadences of Brent slide amusingly into everyday conversation. “The Office was our thing, as a group of mates,” he tells me from a hotel in central London. “And it became a language in which we communicate with each other. I had to check myself loads of times, or people behind the camera would be like, ‘bit too Brent there.’ I couldn’t help it. I was so obsessed with it.”

TV-to-film projects like Big In Japan often struggle to upscale the modest ambition of the small screen: how do you make something suddenly spectacular? Plenty have tried − The Inbetweeners Movie, Kevin & Perry Go Large, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, David Brent: Life on the Road − but with varying results. They’re typically too small and televisual to stand as great films in their own right, while also failing to capture what made the TV originals so beloved. “That was always the worry,” says Mustafa. “Not just it being a TV series but a mockumentary TV series set in grey Brentford with a shaky handheld camera and talking heads. We’re thinking, ‘How’s that going to translate to the cinema?’”

“But we had a little hack for that. It’s called ‘Japan’,” he says, with the satisfied air of a Brent soundbite. “You can just point a camera pretty much anywhere and it all looks cinematic.”

Series five of People Just Do Nothing ended with Kurupt FM leaving the airwaves for good, as Grindah and his family moved from Brentford east to Essex. Big in Japan picks up with Grindah now working as a postman, before a potential Japanese record deal brings their music dream back to life. Once in Japan, however, the group find themselves subject to the whims and pressures of a music industry that sees them as little more than a novelty act.

The transition to film is just the latest step in an evolution that’s been going on behind the scenes of Kurupt FM for a decade. After People Just Do Nothing became a hit on the BBC, Mustafa and the others began booking more off-screen gigs − radio station takeovers and club-nights, all in character. The show’s sensibility was also gently remixed, touching on bigger socio-political issues and adding a bit more pathos to the fold towards the end of its run.

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For one, it started to explore gentrification. “That’s literally what’s happening in Brentford,” Mustafa says. “They’re smashing down the blocks, building new ones, and the locals who are there have to move out. They’re trying to call it ‘South Chiswick’. It’s something we wanted to reflect in the show, but without being preachy and ramming it down people’s necks. Because at the end of the day, we’re not politicians, we’re writing a comedy.” Race is another underlying theme in the show; given that its creators are mostly white, this is often framed through the satirising of cultural appropriation.

There were few subjects the series was afraid of tackling –  it was also candid in its depiction of youth culture, of drug use and apathy among young British adults. “Look at the world we’re living in,” says Mustafa. “It’s like, ‘Why do people pretend they don’t swear when they’re on TV?’ We all swear. We all take drugs. We all s***. We all piss. We all piss ourselves sometimes. For me it’s like, f*** hiding s***. Let’s just put it out there man, and let people make their own decision. Just don’t let children watch it,” he adds.

While the BBC years stayed true to the original improv-heavy ethos, there were new challenges that came from longer-form adaptation, such as the need to rationalise the documentary crew’s presence at all times. “For one episode,” says Mustafa, “we’d written a whole thing about there being a camera in the courtroom, a massive scene. We were all really proud of it. And then we’re like, ‘Hold on, you can’t have cameras in court! That’s in America.’ So that was it. Boom. Throw that away.”

Mustafa and Stamp also had to contend with the problem of writing a series in which nearly every character is an only semi-functional idiot. “It’s funny, because there’s no dead wood, in a way,” says Mustafa (parroting, perhaps unconsciously, a phrase once uttered by Brent). As a solution, he and Stamp would tweak the characters’ buffoonery to meet each story’s demands, “turning each character into dead wood at certain times”. It means there’s no preciousness: on a show filled with posturing clowns, no one is ever the straight man for too long.

People Just Do Nothing may have garnered yet more Office comparisons had a proposed US remake taken off. A pilot was produced, based on what Mustafa describes as an “amazing” script, but it ultimately floundered. “I think People Just Do Nothing works because it’s not written by someone and then given to these trained actors that aren’t from that world. It’s written by us. And we’re from that world. With that, the [US remake’s] writer understood that world, but maybe the actors didn’t. It’s no one’s fault.” Mustafa’s assertion that he’s “from that world” is no exaggeration; like several others of the show’s cast, he has enjoyed a minor music career of his own, MCing in his youth under the alias “Seapa”.

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Mustafa was born to immigrant parents – his father coming from Iraq and his mother from the Czech Republic – and grew up in the suburbs of London (“in the sort of Chessington, Kingston, New Malden area”). Asked to describe his upbringing, he simply replies “sexy”, but goes on to reflect on his early years soberly. “I was just obsessed with everything to do with that rude boy culture: clothes, graffiti, music, weed,” he says. “Weed was massive. It was what everybody did. At the time, it felt like it could be a bit of a problem, that lifestyle.” Indeed, ​​Grindah feels a bit like who Mustafa would have been, had he not found success on TV.

“At home, I had strict foreign parents, and they didn’t know what to do with me,” he continues. “Everything I did, I failed at. I flopped my GCSEs. I paid someone an eighth of skunk to do my college work for me so I could get into uni, and then when I was in uni didn’t know what I was doing so I failed that as well. There was just failure after failure.”

Nonetheless, he doesn’t regret these early, formative struggles. “At the time, it was a bit like, what am I actually doing?” he says. “But on reflection, it was all necessary, because they were the things that made me.”

When Mustafa started making his own webisodes with his friends – “doing something positive” – he kept it secret from his mother. “I never told her, because I used to lie about so much when I was younger,” he says. “I never told her about any of that, and that was like a three-year period. Then one day I went, ‘Oh mum, I’m gonna be doing acting by the way, I’ve got a pilot on BBC on TV.’ She was like, ‘What!?’”

Mustafa’s mother has since revelled in her son’s success, though his father passed away before he could witness it too. “My dad’s not with us anymore, so he never got to see it. It’s quite hard to think what a Middle Eastern man would say – you know, they sort of hardly talk or show any emotion. So he probably would have just grunted and nodded his head. But my mum loves it. When we won a Bafta, she texted all my family around the world saying that I’d won an Oscar! Like, mum, it’s a Bafta, but thanks.”

In an era where “nicecore” TV sitcoms like Ted Lasso and Schitt’s Creek are praised for their gentle, innocuous brand of humour, something like People Just Do Nothing might come off as flagrantly cynical in comparison. But that’s not really the case. “For me, the feel-good doesn’t need to be right on the surface,” says Mustafa. “You shouldn’t have to sugarcoat things, just so everyone likes it. In the end, we always include a vulnerability or a sweet undertone. To help people understand why they’re the way they are.”

It seems like Mustafa has a pretty sound understanding of who he is, at least – even if there’s more than a splash of Grindah in there. How exactly would he describe himself? “Loyal,” he says. “Caring. Intense. Annoying. Grating. Funny. Always late.” A pause. “Gorgeous.” A David Brent mic drop if ever you heard one.

People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan is out in UK cinemas now