Just a few minutes into Channel 4’s new comedy drama The Curse, the narrator informs us that a chain of events has been set in motion and every character but her will die. You don’t exactly have to be a comedy expert to know that stark reminders of humankind’s futile impermanence don’t traditionally get bums on seats, but that’s the kind of show The Curse is.
Set in London’s East End in the 1980s, the series follows a clutch of hapless would-be gangsters who find themselves dropped into a world of trouble when a small-time robbery ends with an accidental haul of gold bullion. It’s narratively tight and extremely gripping, but also finds plenty of pockets of loose, knockabout comedy. As with Only Murders in the Building before it, it’s a balancing act that seems unlikely to work, yet manages to hit the sweet spot over and over again.
The Curse was created in part by Steve Stamp, Allan Mustafa and Hugo Chegwin, who were three-quarters of the brain trust behind the BBC Three breakout People Just Do Nothing. That show was a funny, silly, wonderfully observed sitcom that, by design, didn’t really go anywhere. But this? This claps along like an airport paperback.
“It just feels like we were all at that point in our careers where we wanted to make something that felt like a level up, something different and unexpected,” says Stamp, speaking over Zoom from his kitchen, a long row of trainers neatly leading out to his front door.
Mustafa, joining in on the chat from his own kitchen, where an unopened subscription box of smoothies is balanced on the worktop behind him, can’t hide his excitement about how different it is to his last show. “This is the first time we’ve done something that looks more stylised, like a film,” he says. “The kid in me keeps going: ‘Shit! It actually looks like a proper thing!’”
Meanwhile, Chegwin – calling in separately during a break from filming – has a simpler reason to appreciate The Curse. “My dad loves it, so that’s the main thing,” he explains. “He doesn’t really show emotions, and he did to this.”
Which brings us to the rest of the creative team: Tom Davis and James De Frond, the pair behind Murder in Successville and King Gary. Figuring out how this comedy supergroup came to be took some heavy interrogation – there is lots of hazy talk from all involved about meeting at a nebulous industry awards show – but the genesis of The Curse seems to be a pitch that Chegwin had about an aspiring screenwriter hiding in the witness protection scheme. “It was crap,” he repeatedly assures me.
But Mustafa urged him to take the idea to Davis and De Frond. “And then they were like, ‘Actually, we’ve got this idea,’ which is effectively The Curse, and said, ‘We’d like to try to develop it collectively.’”
The charming thing about this collaboration is that both ends seem to think they’ve got the better deal. The People Just Do Nothing contingent are all clearly beside themselves that a heavyweight like Davis would pick them to work with, while Davis can’t believe his luck that they actually agreed.
“They’re a phenomenal bunch of boys,” says Davis, smiling, in what is either a large spare room or a small warehouse. “I was dying to work with them from the moment I saw People Just Do Nothing. And I think that it’s quite underestimated how much of an influence they’ve had on the world of comedy. That show, I think, speaks out to a generation.”
The key bonding element, Davis believes, is that they have all made it up the ladder without the traditional privileges. “[We] have very similar backgrounds to each other, but didn’t come through the normal sort of Oxbridge world,” he explains. “I think, weirdly, you can see it in the show and in the writing – it’s that underdog spirit.”
I admit to them all that I’m fascinated by such a sprawling collaboration. To me, it seems like it has the potential to be a minefield of ego and compromise. As they explain it, it seems as though the success of The Curse is down to its unhurried development – Davis estimates that it took four years to get it to our screens – and also the ease with which everyone found their roles in the collective.
“James [De Frond] and Steve [Stamp] are kind of like the puzzle masters,” says Chegwin. “They look at it from a real deep way. Like, they’re super-funny and super-creative and imaginative, but they put the puzzle together really well in terms of structure and things.”
“Having the director as a writer is amazing,” says Stamp of De Frond. “James led most of the writing. He also kept all of the notes of the scripts as we were going through them, which was nice for me because I’ve never had that before, really.”
“He’s the dad,” Mustafa adds.
“And Tom [Davis], he comes out with the maddest stuff,” says Stamp. “He’ll just throw in a whole new backstory for his character, where he’s dating a 7ft woman or whatever. And it’s like: ‘Where has this come from?’”
“We all have the same end goal, which is to make it as good and as funny as it can possibly be,” continues Chegwin. “And if it doesn’t make sense or it doesn’t work, there’s no ego in the room; there’s no like, ‘Oh no, my idea must be in there,’ or anything like that. It’s all love.”
On top of everything else, The Curse feels like an authentic period piece, set in the 1980s but – as with real life – the characters’ clothes and music tastes lagging a few years behind. I ask Mustafa if it was hard finding pockets of the old tumbledown East End, given London’s identikit gentrification. “We actually filmed it in Liverpool,” he tells me. “There’s just so many amazing locations there. You’ve got the docks, you’ve got the arches. Even just the fact that they’ve got so many old, derelict buildings. Our cafe set wasn’t a studio; it was just a real old cafe that we recreated as an even older cafe.”
The choice of era, the creators explain, was partly down to necessity. In an age where Line of Duty has taught everyone that CCTV, trace DNA and mobile data mean that nobody can ever get away with anything, small-time crooks like these would be banged up in an instant. But 40 years ago that simply wasn’t the case. “When police were going off just chatting to the locals, you could get away with more crime,” explains Mustafa with a grin. “Also, Tom and James are really old and they were about in the 80s. Put that in there.”
The key to getting The Curse right, Davis explains, was to make the characters peripheral to the gangland crime of the time. “Everyone, in that time and in that world, was probably always just rubbing up against guys that you might have gone to school with, who are embedded into that criminal world,” he says. “But you have to then make them lovable and you have to make the odds against them.”
Like all good gangster stories, The Curse doesn’t really get going until after the robbery itself, when everyone is left to figure out the consequences of their actions. “You’ve got all this fucking gold; what are you going to do with it?” Davis says. “And also, how are you going to handle that? How’s it going to change you? From episode three, they’re hanging on to their sensibilities and the friendship, but the rope is starting to fray. And, I think for four, five, six, it’s a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’, because everybody will come and bite you in the arse.”
Given its filmic nature, and its doomy opening prophecy, I had assumed that The Curse was designed as a one-season wonder: a confidently told story with everything aimed at a finish line. Apparently, though, this isn’t the case.
“There is a finish line in the sense that some of the characters are going to die,” says Stamp. “But you don’t know how long that timescale is, basically. In an ideal world, we want to take it to the next decade, so it’ll be the 90s. There’s a lot of stuff around where that gold ended up, and what it helped to create. The drug scene in the 90s was very tied up in that gold’s journey.”
“There’s a long way to go in the gold’s journey,” says Mustafa, “but I guess let’s see.”
Hugo Chegwin, on the other hand, seems less bothered about the future. The Curse is already a victory for him. “I think my dad loves me now,” he gasps over the phone. “Just took him 36 years, but that’s cool.”
The Curse starts airing weekly on Channel 4 from Sunday 6 February at 10pm.
