Wearing market stall fake brand tracksuits with the bottoms hanging around the back of his knees baring supermarket pants, affecting a Jamaican patois shouting, ‘Massive junglist respec’ going out in da area, Biggigdy Biggidy bong, Aiiiiiiiiii!’ is an apt description of our Editor who believes that it makes him down with the kids rather than the middle class married man with two kids and mortgage he actually is (Is you dissing me? – Ed). Yet it’s a style that seems to have been inexplicably adopted by modern youth and which the TV series People Just Do Nothing brilliantly skewered with its band of wannabe garage stars Kurrupt FM from the mean streets of Brentford. After the shutting down of the Kurupt FM pirate radio station we now have the chapter in their ‘careers’ with People Just Do Nothing Big in Japan.
Instigated by the news that one of their songs from a repertoire of two has been used on a hugely popular TV show in Japan and their inept chancer of a manager Chabuddy G (Asim Chaudhry) sees it as his opportunity to get back into management taking them group to the country and possibly the next stage in international stardom. MC Grindah (Allan Mustafa), Steves (Steve Stamp) DJ Beats (Hugo Chegwin), & Decoy (Daniel Woolford) with their manager hoick themselves across to Japan and almost immediately the film becomes a clash of cultures that’s always at the expense of the clueless clowns. Many of the 70’s TV sitcoms often resorted to taking the cast away from the TV studio setting to an exotic locale although in the case of Are You being Served? It was to another studio with a tonne of sand dumped on the studio purporting to be Spain but here the group really are in Japan and are as out of place and looked on with as much bemusement as they when they were in Brentford. But mercifully it doesn’t go down the ‘funny foreigner’ route with the group being the butt of the jokes even if it is, at times, endearing such as when they insist on taking their shoes off wherever they go.
But Chabuddy G soon finds him being sidelined by the Japanese corporate music man Taka who begins to mould them into a boyband with daft outfits, disco dance moves and a new name that one of the group regards as making them ‘sound like a paedophile ring’. With their trip counting down to a concert it all starts to go inevitably awry with Taka manipulating the troupe of gormless goons into the band the corporation want them to be.
Film versions of British TV comedy shows have been notoriously uneven with Bad Education, Dad’s Army (2016) and the David Brent movie ‘Life on the Road’ unable to repeat their small screen success with perhaps only Alan Partridge & Borat able to recapture the small screen magic on the big screen. With cinemas now back to some sort of normal and the summer blockbusters having had their run it’s a relief to see some big screen comedy of which there has been a dearth and whilst this is not without its problems (some of the roles are underwritten, the plot is well trodden and its doesn’t achieve the pathos that Ricky Gervais attains in his work) it’s by far the best comedy of the year with plenty of laughs to be had at the hapless halfwits
Here’s the People Just Say Nothing Big in Japan trailer…….
