Asim Chaudhry

Chabuddy G hands over a business card. There is always a card, always a venture printed on it that nobody in Brentford has asked for, and the smile that comes with it is the performance. Asim Chaudhry's manager in People Just Do Nothing can be turned down, ripped off and locked out in a single afternoon and describe it that evening as networking. Most comic actors let a flicker of panic show under the front. Chaudhry does not, ever, and the steadiness is what makes the man funny across five series and, given long enough, quietly sad.

The series began as YouTube videos made by four men who met studying media at West Thames College: Chaudhry, Hugo Chegwin, Steve Stamp and Allan Mustafa. BBC Three commissioned it, the first four half-hour episodes went out in July 2014, and it ran to 2018, with a feature, People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan, following in 2021. The debt to The Office is plain in every episode and we have said so. It matters less than it should, because the people are not borrowed. Chaudhry has said the character is mostly drawn from his father, and from the Hounslow wheeler-dealers he grew up among, and it shows: Chabuddy is observed, not invented.

We laughed hardest at him, and kept laughing after it stopped being comfortable, because Chaudhry never once asks us to like the man and never protects himself from the joke either. "My type of comedy is always self-deprecating, the joke's always on me," he has said, and it is true in a way that is rarer than it sounds; plenty of performers say it and then leave themselves a way out. He is also better in company than alone. The scene we remember best from the first series is not his: Stamp's Steves says something plain about his own life and the laugh dies. Chaudhry is one of the people who wrote that room, and the ensemble is where his writing shows.

The reservation is small and it is about what came after. Big in Japan stays close to what the audience already loved rather than trying anything new with it, and since then Chaudhry has taken small parts in large films: Mohan Thakur in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), a co-worker in Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), a warehouse employee in Barbie (2023), plus Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, and television in Industry and The Sandman. None of them has needed more than a few minutes of him. He also writes and directs shorts, which is the more promising line, since the one thing he made from scratch is the thing that lasted. Chabuddy G would have had the card printed already.