While feed fatigue is now a legit condition thanks to the constant stream of content we’re force-fed online, when the group of friends behind People Just Do Nothing started shooting videos of themselves and posting them on YouTube in the late noughties, there were hardly any other examples of content developed specifically for social. Let alone a mockumentary about a pirate radio station broadcasting garage from a tower block in Brentford, west London.

“We’d be getting comments like, ‘These guys are fucking wasters, get a job’. People weren’t as sophisticated in their viewing habits as they are today,” says Bullion Productions founder Ben Murray, who shot a lot of the early episodes. “It took us two years to do five episodes that we posted on YouTube,” adds Steve Stamp, who co-wrote the show and plays one of its most lovable characters, Steves. “The YouTube stuff blew up in a very small way comparatively to what goes on now. I remember us having 5,000 views and that was a big deal.”

The show’s cult following only grew when it graduated onto our TV screens in 2014. It ran on BBC Three for five seasons in total, beating Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag to win Best Scripted Comedy at the BAFTAs in 2017. The Kurupt FM crew – which also includes MC Grindah (Allan ‘Seapa’ Mustafa), Beats (Hugo Chegwin) and Decoy (Danny Rankin), plus Grindah’s partner Miche (Lily Brazier) and the group’s manager/serial entrepreneur Chabuddy G (Asim Chaudhry) – have since grown beyond the confines of the scripted series, playing festivals including Glastonbury, launching their own podcast, and even releasing a feature film, People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan, in 2021.

Having mostly met in and around Brentford, it was only fitting that one of the creators’ biggest inspirations, Ricky Gervais’ iconic series The Office, was set just a stone’s throw away in Slough. “We didn’t really like wacky, silly comedies, and even when we first started messing around with these characters and filming stuff we were improvising, it was always grounded in reality,” says Stamp. “We felt like the funniest stuff was the stuff that you believed, especially in The Office. The fact that it was the little things that everyone got hung up on, that was always what we loved.”

Originally centred around a tower block with a number of different characters and storylines (including an apt one about gentrification), much of the early format for People Just Do Nothing was born from ad-hoc weekend meetings, when they’d share ideas and create rough treatments. Stamp had a notepad that he’d doodle on religiously in meetings, and ended up sketching a backwards Nike tick with ‘Just Do Nothing’ instead of ‘Just Do It’, which spawned the show’s name.

From there, they started testing out potential characters on camera to see what worked and what didn’t. “I think that the stuff that really clicked for us was the Kurupt FM characters,” says Murray. “That’s why you do those testing things, you start seeing the cream rising a little bit and we homed in on what it was about the show that was strong. Chabuddy G was originally a very small character in one of the videos that we did, but everyone loved him.”

Having already built up a sizeable audience on YouTube and Facebook, they were approached by Rough Cut – the production company founded by The Office’s producer Ash Atalla – and shot a pilot episode for BBC in 2012 before getting the green light for the first series. “We’d had a few meetings about whether we wanted to make it into a TV show but that was the first one where we were like, let’s do it, because it was the right person,” explains Stamp.

For fans of the show and the comedy world more generally, the entire concept felt like a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of the other stuff that was coming out at the time, in an industry still dominated by people from middle-class backgrounds. “The whole show has always been loved for its authenticity. It celebrates a uniquely British musical subculture and is written and acted by people who grew up as part of that subculture,” says Joe Prytherch, aka Mason London, who has been Kurupt FM’s go-to graphic designer since their inception.

“The first thing I designed for them was a PJDN logo which was a rip-off of the YSL logo … until we decided to come up with a new logo for Kurupt FM the crew rather than the show. That’s when the Kurupt hand logo was born in 2014,” he says. Since then, he’s designed multiple iterations of the symbol, including a 10th anniversary design last year that ended up becoming the backdrop to its Brixton Academy headline show, along with merch designs and even some kawaii versions of the cast that were used in their feature film.

It was always about making sure that everything we did, we were doing for the culture that we respected and loved so much

Already a fan from the show’s YouTube days, illustrator Reuben Dangoor is another creative collaborator they’ve worked with regularly over the years, after he was commissioned to create a piece of art for each episode of season three. “I was then showing some paintings at Tate Britain for one of their Tate Late exhibitions and Kurupt were doing a performance, which was mayhem in a gallery like that. I painted them looking regal and riding horses (except Chabuds, who got a zebra, and Steves was backwards on a donkey),” he says.

In the same vein, grime photographer Vicky Grout shot a lot of Kurupt FM’s early press photos, and the group tapped up none other than record label XL to work on their 2017 album The Lost Tape. “We did a fake documentary about the Lost Tape that’s on YouTube, interviewing loads of [UKG] legends, and it’s basically Ewen Spencer spoofing his own documentaries,” says Stamp. “So it was always about trying to have the right people around and making sure that everything we did, we were doing for the culture that we respected and loved so much.”

From the outset, the team had the foresight to recognise the as-yet untapped potential to collaborate with brands in a way that was genuinely entertaining for audiences – something that’s seen as the holy grail on social now. “I remember working with Subway and the first thing that Beats said was, ‘It fucking stinks in here. Why does Subway stink?’. They were like ‘No, we can’t say that!’ But it just got everybody laughing and loosened up,” says Stamp.

“I think that’s what people liked about working with us, the experience on set was always disruptive and fun. They would get what they wanted in the end but there was always a lot of saying things that we knew we weren’t allowed to be saying, just to be Kurupt FM basically. It’s always about undermining what you’re being sold and finding an angle that’s more ridiculous.”

The surge of interest from brands like Nike and the growing demand for extra social content also meant that Murray could continue to play a part in the growing Kurupt FM universe while, crucially, not losing the essence of the original concept. “Me and Steve also wrote a bunch of mini episodes that were informed by the show but were their own style and world,” he says.

“Steves on Aliens was very stylised, Grindah’s Prison Stories was inspired by those banged up abroad type shows, and Miche’s Miracles was like a fake version of those really shit high street makeover shows. These caricatures were slipping into different formats that were familiar to audiences and owning them, and I think that was paving the way to then do other things that felt really experimental.”

Performing live has been another natural extension of the Kurupt FM brand, whether through their IRL Champagne Steam Room raves or, more recently, their 10th anniversary show at Brixton Academy. ““We were trying to interweave it all, and it was just a way of us being able to meet the fans and party with everyone basically,” says Stamp. “I feel like now some people just see us as a music act and don’t really know that it’s a TV show.”

As well as allowing them to revisit their characters every now and then, their live shows have also become a good excuse for the group of friends to hang out with each other, particularly when they’re all busy working on new projects (Stamp and Murray have co-written two series of BBC series Peacock, which also stars Mustafa). And while Stamp says they they haven’t ruled out a more official return in the form of a new series or even a Christmas special, what he’s enjoying the most is watching Kurupt FM’s story take on a life of its own.

“People have weird references like, ‘Oh, you’re that geezer from Dragon’s Den’ because they’ve seen the Dragons Den sketch we did, or recognise us from a Jorja Smith music video or something,” he laughs. “Every now and then, there’s another little buzz around it for some reason. It exists as a thing that people are still watching and discovering, and we’ve all made sure that we’re involved in everything along the way. I think that’s why it’s managed to land and connect with people.”

@kuruptfm