Series / People Just Do Nothing

Welcome to Kurupt FM ^note L-R: Decoy, Steves, Grindah, Beats

A day in the life Mockumentary comedy airing on BBC.

The BBC's cameras follow the Pretty Fly for a White Guy duo of MC Grindah and DJ Beats, the voices of 108.9 Kurupt FM, a very small time pirate radio station ran out of a filthy West London apartment block. The station specialises in garage, jungle and freestyle rap, and also hosts fellow DJs Steves, Decoy and Fantasy as they rotate shifts, pumping the beats at all hours, to the chagrin of their neighbours.

In between their "day job", the cameras also show Grindah and Beats' struggles with their relationships outside of Kurupt. Grindah has a daughter with his girlfriend Miche, a socially-conscious airhead who wants to get married. Beats is shacked up with older girlfriend Roche and stepson Craig, and later goes on to have a baby daughter with Roche. Finally, the show follows the gang's associate Chabuddy G, a scummy grifter and hustler who provides the Kurupt boys with quick and dirty solutions to various problems.

Was brought to the states in 2017 on the Viceland network. The show ended after 5 seasons in 2018. A film continuation "People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan" is set for release in August 2021.

Tropes

• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: In a drunken stupor during the opening of Chabuddy's rave club, Grindah proposes to Miche. She accepts, much to his horror the following morning.
  • Not helped by Grindah taking what are implied to be Ecstasy pills earlier in the night!
• Abusive Parents: Although she starts off a loving and dotty mother, Miche's helicopter parenting of Angel takes a nasty turn later in the series. She sabotages Angel's friendships at school, harshly criticises and belittles her academic prowess, and directly blames Angel for Grindah not wanting to spend time with Miche.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Poor Angel has mum Miche constantly visiting and pestering her at school, joining her on school trips and sitting in on music & drama rehearsals.
  • Miche's own mother is pretty cringeworthy.
  • Craig also gets stepdad Beats randomly visiting him at university, and embarrassing the hell out of him by trying to hook Craig up with random girls in a really creepy way.
• Asian Store-Owner: Kurupt FM's associate and business partner, Chabuddy G, an illegal immigrant from Pakistan who makes a living from ripping people off and living beyond his means.
• Awful Wedded Life: Chabuddy's wife, Aldona, despises him and is openly abusive towards him. She eventually steals all his valuables and leaves for good.
• Bittersweet Ending: Grindah finally realizes his MC dreams are never going to take off like he dreams, and with the block being torn down, Kurupt FM officially ends. But he also finally decides to put his family first, and moves out to Essex with them.
• Bland-Name Product: Chabuddy makes his money hocking knockoff products on people.
• Blatant Lies: Pretty much everything that comes out of Grindah's mouth, which is mostly talking about how amazing he allegedly is.
• British Brevity: Each season had no more than 6 episodes. It was even shorter in season 1 and 2 with 4 and 5 episodes respectfully. After it's final season, it aired a total of 27 episodes though a spinoff movie was later announced.
• The Bully: Grindah treats everyone around him incredibly poorly, including his wife Mishe and best friend Beats, and is borderline abusive towards Butt-Monkey Steves, who he exploits for his flat, his kindness and his naivety.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite their microscopically small status, Grindah and Beats are capable of some sick lyrics.
• Butt-Monkey: Beats garners respect in the gang as Grindah's right-hand man, but is definitely a useless butt monkey at home, where Roche wears the trousers, runs the household and takes the piss out of him.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Grindah really struggles with saying "I love you" to Miche, and turns into a mumbling, childish idiot whenever she kisses him.
• Chained to a Bed: Chabuddy G's Polish wife Aldona appears to drug him and then rob his van and internet cafe gear in series 1.
  • Happens much more literally later on with Carol, a true sex addict and pest who enjoys beating and torturing Chabuddy during sex.
• The Chew Toy: Steves. He's a barely functioning addict for starts. And Grindah convinced him to stick his Grandma in a nursing home, so they could run Kurupt out of her vacated flat. He's also effectively homeless, cause he lived with her at the time. And then she dies.
• Chocolate Baby: Grindah is rather Dale Gribble like in his comic inability to tell that Angel isn't his biological spawn. It's strongly implied throughout the series that Decoy is her real father (and that both Decoy and Miche know this).
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Fellow DJ Weapon X disappears sometime after series 2, but he never had any dialogue anyway.
• Cliffhanger: Season 4 ends with the police ransacking Kurupt FM and confiscating all of the radio gear, followed by a dramatic arrest of Steves for wireless offences and drug possession.
• Cool Old Lady: Steves Nan. A sweet old bird, and really the only person who treats him decently. Which is why it hits him hard when she passes.
• Crapsack World: The show is set in and around a sink estate in Brentford, West London, full of old 60s tower blocks and grim, graffitied, neglected concrete streetscapes. Steve's apartment, the Kurupt headquarters, is particularly filthy and derelict.
  • It is however the comedic variety of Crapsack World; although the cast have clearly lived there all their lives, with no hope of ever changing their ways, everybody does seem generally happy with their lot.
• Cringe Comedy: Kurupt FM's live debut of Heart Monitor Riddem at a nightclub in Ipswich, which crashes into a deafeningly awkward silence across the dance floor.
  • This happens yet again during the party at Craig's university, and is the moment that Grindah finally realises his MC'ing dreams are done for.
• Darkest Hour: Grindah finds himself homeless at the end of series 3 after being kicked out by both Miche and Roche, so he goes to live with Steves. By the start of series 4, he's become a dirty, smelly drug addict with scruffy hair and irrational paranoia about everyone around him.
• Epic Fail: A recurring theme throughout the series.
  • When Steves is left in charge of Kurupt alone during Grindah's court appearance, he spills a bottle of his piss all over Grindah's set-list and all over the mixing decks. He deals with the stress by dropping acid.
  • Most of Chabuddy's business ventures end in failure, especially the more ad-hoc ones like his baby shower package.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Grindah suddenly gains about six months of scruffy hair between series 3 and 4, as he descends into drug-fuelled schizophrenic madness. He shaves his hair back to normal after going cold turkey.
• Extreme Door Mat: Even though Decoy is quite a bit more competent than his friends, he's either too apathetic or weak-willed to challenge Grindah's idiocy. Decoy occasionally steps in to look after Angel, which he seems much more adept at than Grindah. Even though Decoy is displeased that his biological daughter is being raised by a malignant scumbag, he's too spineless to actually do anything about it. Like the title of the show, he just stands around saying and doing nothing.
• Fat Slob: Roche's son Craig, who is pretty much melded to his gaming chair.
  • Despite his morbid obesity and gaming obsession, he seems surprisingly approachable and socially connected, more so than his idiot stepdad Beats.
• Friendship Moment: Grindah and Beats have several poofy bro-hug moments throughout the series. See also Heterosexual Life-Partners.
• Jerkass: Grindah really is totally obnoxious, passive-aggressive and completely unlikable. He admits blatantly to the camera that he's lying to Miche about being a changed man, just so she will take him back and give him a house to live in again. He also purposely ruins Beats' growing friendship with Darren in order to maintain his control of Beats. For some reason, Beats and Miche are both completely smitten with him.
  • Roche and Miche's mum Carol are both openly hostile to Grindah, and Decoy is shown frequently rolling his eyes and getting exasperated at him.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Decoy.
• Kavorka Man: After an unsuccessful first marriage, Chabuddy G ends up in a relationship with Miche's nymphomaniac mum Carol - in spite of his disgusting appearance, micro-penis and erectile dysfunction. He is also living in a van and shitting in a bucket...
  • While he's far from unattractive to look at, it's astonishing that someone as abhorrent and selfish as Grindah was able to score a girlfriend in the first place. Some lines of dialogue make it obvious his sex life pre-Miche was non-existent.
  • One episode has Miche describe what she perceived as her & Grindah's MeetCute: essentially Grindah harassing her out of his car window, & Miche liking the attention.
• Large Ham: Grindah exaggerates and dramatises all the time, and makes everything about him, including choosing himself as Angel's godfather in a belligerent, overblown speech to the attendees.
• Limited Social Circle: Evidenced a few times at milestone events such as Angel's christening, where perennial losers Steves and Chabuddy G make up a sizable percentage of attendees. Miche at least branches out and makes a few friends at the hair salon, and Decoy gets a girlfriend from elsewhere, but the rest of the gang remains totally insular.
• Mockumentary: Shot in a documentary-style format, aping one of the inspirations, a 2003 BBC documentary called Tower Block Dreams which followed a similar but very real bunch of pirate radio MC/DJ losers around. There's even direct parodies of said documentary in this series, such as the threatening neighbour's letter appearing almost word-for-word in one early episode, some characters as Beats and Decoy sharing names with the original documentary's denizens, and the camera crew interjecting with logical leading questions that get stupid answers.
• Never My Fault: Grindah blames everyone around him for everything that goes wrong, including his family, and flatly refuses to take responsibility for anything whatsoever. On the few occasions he does, he over-dramatises it like the Large Ham he is.
• Only One Name: The real/full names of the main characters are gradually revealed throughout the series, but Decoy, Roche and Fantasy are only ever known by their nicknames.
• Only Sane Man: Decoy is the only member of Kurupt FM who manages to stay out of trouble. At the same time, he does very little to prevent his friends from dragging him into their idiotic schemes.
  • Roche is also the female equivalent.
• Parent with New Paramour: Beats is said new Paramour to Roche, and tries repeatedly to bond with Craig. The results are frequently unsuccessful, although the two warm to each other somewhat in the second series.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Grindah and Beats. Grindah more so.
• Reincarnation: When his nan dies on the same day Roche's baby is born, Steves becomes convinced she's her reincarnation.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Kurupt FM barely transmits outside the apartment complex. Doesn't stop Grindah and Beats from thinking they're a big deal. To their credit, they do seem to have accumulated a moderate cult following in their part of London, as it's shown that they have some fans.
• Stepford Smiler: Miche constantly has a fake, awkward, forced smile on her face whenever at work or talking to the camera, and almost everything she does is for the benefit of her social media feeds. She also lets Grindah get away with a hell of a lot of emotional abuse and feckless buffoonery, smiling and laughing it off the whole time, before finally kicking him out.
  • Chabuddy is outwardly cheery but there are hints of darkness lurking beneath the surface.
  "The voices in my head were telling me, like, 'Just end it all mate. You're a failure. There's no point. What's the point, mate? Just kill yourself!' But no, no."
• Sticky Fingers: Steves instinctively shoplifts to survive, stuffing items down his trousers and socks wherever he goes. He's so used to it that he continues to do so, even after his Nan dies and leaves him thousands of pounds in inheritance, even in shops when he WANTS to pay!
• Technician vs. Performer: This is the basic radio dynamic between MC Grindah the motor-mouthed freestyle rapper, and DJ Beats, the background music man. Grindah tries to DJ himself while Beats is away with his baby, and ends up muting everything.
• The Stoic: Craig, who seldom changes his expression and is very terse when he speaks.
  • Decoy also acts the same way, even while the rest of the Kurupt gang around him are freaking out and panicking about something (which they do regularly).
• The Stoner: Grindah, Beats and Steves are all almost incapable of functioning without weed.
• Title Drop: In the fourth episode of series one, Grindah comes out with a pretty inspiring speech for why he does what he does:
  "I'll literally do anything it takes to keep Kurupt FM going, yeah... there's two types of people in this world. You got the layabouts, yeah, the people that do nothing. And you've got the doers. Think it's pretty obvious which one I am. I'm on a fucking roof, so..."
• Undying Loyalty: Beats is absolutely besotted with Grindah, looks up to him as a hero and would do anything for him.
• Valentine's Day Episode: The season 3 finale is set during an eventful V-day. With Roche giving birth, Steves nan dying and Kurupt FM falling apart around Grindah's head. In addition to Miche finally breaking things off with him.
• Villain Protagonist: Grindah is a difficult character to sympathize with. Putting aside the fact that he's surly and arrogant at the best of times, he's also horribly abusive to both his friends and his family.