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TV Review: People Just Do Nothing (BBC3): Not very useful idiots

Chabuddy G, Ultrapaneer (Asim Chaudhry): BBC
Chabuddy G, Ultrapaneer (Asim Chaudhry): BBC

There are lots of ways in which People Just Do Nothing succeeds as near-peerless comedy (only This Country, another BBC Three creation, and Channel 4's The Windsors rivals it). Now just into its fourth series, the team has shifted gear a little, run plot lines a little longer, and introduce some tension and poignancy into proceedings without losing anything of the wit and pace that make it so superbly balanced.

So we still laugh with and at the members of Kurupt FM, a bunch of idiots (ie men idiots) running a pirate radio station somewhere in Brentford, plus their long-suffering womenfolk who underpin the Kurupt Crew’s pitiful deluded existences by at least earning a bit of a living.

The mockumentary style still succeeds, and I was very pleased to see the MC Grindah character evolve out of his David Brentesque pretensions and move into some properly squalid ones of his own – Allan Mustafa taking credit here as actor and co-writer on this episode, along with Steve Stamp (who doubles as the painfully vulnerable DJ Steves). Crack cocaine, bereavement, emotional insecurity, sexual poverty and desperation, social media, garage, jungle, stupidity, self-delusion, slappers, bankruptcy, borderline child neglect, home-made lasagne; it’s all there and it’s all very funny because the Kurupt FM crew are so unlikeable, every one of them either a loser of a user, or both, only varying in the scale of their shortcomings as human beings.

The scripts and cast are as superb as ever, but Asim Chaudhry as Chabuddy G, failed businessman or “ Ultrapaneer” as he call himself, reduced now to living in the back of his 11-Reg Renault Trafic van and using a bucket for a toilet is the most pitiful of all. The point where he confesses to DJ Beats (Hugo Chegwin) that he’s just “A Man in a Wan” was probably the comic one liner of the year.

If not that, then his earlier observation that the reason he likes hanging around the “Babies r Us” megastore is to chat up mums, because “I like a women who's sexually experienced. But also a little bit tired”.

Congratulations too, to BBC T6hree for yet another inspired creation. I am full of admiration, and I beg you to watch it: PJDN is officially sick.

I wouldn’t want to go all anti-BBC and moralistic about The Big Family Cooking Showdown – there’s no shortage of media organisations to fill that role – but I do have a couple of issues with TBFCS, as we will no doubt learn to call it. First off last night’s £10 supper challenge looked extremely suspicious to me. The Dawes family, definitely the more irritating of the two competing, purported to be able to create four different pizzas for ten quid. Which is to say pizza made from fresh dough – which I concede may be cheaper than buying ready-made, though there’s no apparent allowance for the capital expenditure required for a dough-maker (maybe £900) – plus a range of toppings.

For the sake of transparency on my part I should detail these: courgette and feta; aubergine and olive; butternut squash and stilton; brussels sprouts and chorizo. Unlike on Ready, Steady, Cook, which presents virtually a fully audited set of accounts for each lash up of a meal, there was not even an effort to explain how all this amounted to affordable sustenance for the Just About Managing in May’s Britain. The Karim's chicken curry, by the way, was much more believable as a cheap and tasty dinner. My idea of a £10 supper is of course to ring up Dominos and get a Sloppy Giuseppe with a stuffed crust inside me. Not a euphemism, by the way.

Second, I have an issue with the judges, who are engaged in a sort of exercise to trip up the contestants. You see when they just do stuff they are used to, then they get slagged off for being unimaginative; but when they go all adventurous then they get criticised for messing it up and get told they should have stuck to what they know about. The only exception was the Karims, who managed to satisfy the judges near impossible demands with their Moroccan feast. They deserved to go through, but really because they weren’t quite as annoying as the other lot, who were just a collection of massively smug Waitrose types.

Try as Zoe Ball and Nadiya Hussain tried, it is just turgid to watch, whatever the wild salmon fillets or the harrira tasted like. I think the low point, of many, was an excruciatingly inane exchange among members of the Dawes family about using chopsticks around the kitchen. Things were only enlivened by what I took to be a couple of below the radar attempts at smutty humour. A reference to “smacking the cucumber” was welcomed by Zoe who told us that she “can’t wait to give that a go myself”. There was also a remark about “jazz hands” which I probably should leave to rest in the circumstances. After all, you should always wash your hands when handling food.