Allan Mustafa

Whenever anyone tells MC Grindah something true about his lyrics, Allan Mustafa plays the half-second afterwards as a man deciding whether he has heard a joke or a declaration of war. He chooses war. That is the engine of People Just Do Nothing (2014), and the thing Mustafa does that most comic actors cannot: he plays a vain, thin-skinned, workshy man without once winking at us over the top of him. Grindah believes he is the finest lyricist in west London. Mustafa believes it with him for the length of every take, and lets the documentary camera do the disagreeing.

The station came out of a real one. Mustafa had been on pirate radio in Kingston, and with Hugo Chegwin, Steve Stamp and Asim Chaudhry, friends from college and a call centre, he made YouTube sketches about a fictional one before a pilot was commissioned in 2012. The series began in July 2014 and ran five series to 2018, and the Kurupt FM crew went abroad together for People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan (2021), which Mustafa co-wrote. Since then he has tried other rooms: a supporting part as Chaz in Dean Craig's Love Wedding Repeat (2020); The Curse (2022), a crime comedy he co-created, playing Albert Fantoni; and Peacock (2022), a sitcom about body image and middle age written with Stamp, with Mustafa as its lead.

What works is the group. Mustafa and Stamp wrote the scripts, the cast talked round them, and Jack Clough, who has directed six of their projects, keeps the camera still while the men argue themselves into trouble. Chegwin's Beats apologises for things he has not done. Chaudhry's Chabuddy G has a business card for every venture and a customer for none. Grindah is only funny against people who indulge him, and only sad against people who love him. We laughed at him for five series and felt sorry for him for most of them, and both came from the same place: Mustafa plays the vanity straight and lets the hurt show only in the gaps between the big talk. He has said it himself: "There’s a sadness to People Just Do Nothing, but a sweetness to it, too."

What has not worked yet is Mustafa on his own. Chaz in Love Wedding Repeat is jealous, and that is the whole character, one trait tapped like a man checking a microphone, in a farce that lands one laugh in three. Nobody in that villa gets more than one trait, so the fault is not his. But it shows how much of Grindah is built out of the men standing next to him. The shows he has made since have mostly been received as what came after Kurupt FM rather than as things in themselves, which is the usual price of a long hit. Grindah would tell you the station never needed anyone else. On this evidence, Mustafa does.