“Is there going to be another People Just Doing Nothing?” enquires the wry, anxious bartender who has been staring a little too obviously in our direction. Steve Stamp chuckles. “Not at the moment,” he replies. “Peacock though – that’s out next week.” The barman grunts in laboured agreement, shrinking into his dichotomy of emotion. “I paid him to be there,” Stamp jokes, turning to me sitting next to him on the bar top. “He’s quite an obvious plant.”

It must be a familiar thread through the life of an actor, writer and general comedic polymath who broke big in his early 30s as loveable dunce Steves in the Bafta Award-winning BBC mockumentary series, People Just Do Nothing. The cult favourite show, which he also co-created and wrote, finished in 2018. Although Stamp and his band of merry idiots reunited for a feature film, Big In Japan, in 2021, there are no further plans for the show; much to the disappointment of its droves of disciplines such as the barman. They will, though, be popping up at Glastonbury this year, and also celebrating the 10th anniversary of their fictional Pirate Radio station Kurupt FM, with a Brixton Academy show in September also announced, at which Stamp will be, “dancing like a fucking maniac. Just embodying Steves; the Bez kind of character.”

At a gregarious old English boozer a stone’s throw from Tottenham Court Road station, Stamp, a quick-witted man in his late 30s (who some might recognise from his Top Boy cameo), meets me to talk about his latest endeavour, BBC Three’s Peacock, which is entering its second series this summer. A sitcom set in a gym that revolves around an ignorant if endearing personal trainer, the show sees several of the PJDN cast and crew alumni back together; the work of now seasoned TV professionals stepping out from beneath their incepting hit series’ decorated shadow.

“Peacock was actually me going off and doing my own thing separately,” Stamp remembers. But after a pilot attempt that brought in heavyweight British actors Dominic Cooper and Tom Davis proved “a sick experience, but it wasn’t the same, it was a very different show,” Stamp and co-creator Ben Murray found themselves knocking on a familiar door, casting fellow PJDN stalwart Allan ‘Seapa’ Mustafa perfectly in the titular role. “In comedy there’s this expression that I hate,” Stamp says when I ask about the decision to cast Mustafa. “It’s so gross, it’s – ‘funny bones’, like people having funny bones. It’s such a mum expression, but the BBC are obsessed with it, they literally use that as a fucking everyday expression around the BBC offices. But it’s a shorthand for something that I do actually understand; like there’s people that are just always on, Seapa being one of them. Everywhere they go, every situation that they come into, every person that they meet, they’re always funny, and they’re always looking for a joke. In comedy, they’re the catalysts of what makes it all work. So, that’s why I think you end up working with people that you already know are sick. There’s an alchemy that you have to find.”

Although not necessarily an instant success story, Peacock – like The Curse, Stamp’s other post-People Just Doing Nothing project – has found an audience and, in the BBC, a platform willing to trust the creative forces who have already granted them one award-winning and acclaimed project. But there are certain pressures and expectations that the writer still has to manage. “Obviously when you’ve had a hit show, even a cult hit like PJDN. it builds to the point where it’s rich and well crafted. It took five years even to get to series one. So to then do a show [Peacock] that we’ve been working on for one series, it’s a hard thing to weigh up against a show that you’ve been doing for ages. People are like – ‘it’s not as good as PJDN’ – of course it’s not! These things have to marinate, develop, get better and evolve. I think that’s where we are with Peacock now – we’ve done one series, found the characters, and [the new second series] definitely elevates the show. You get more into the world and start understanding everyone in a different way. Then there’s also the new characters that are fleshing out the world. So in theory the next series will be even better. That’s how I’d like to imagine it, anyway.”

Constructing a world around a show, though, can prove a tricky eccentricity when the powers-that-be are breathing down your neck. Modern society, with its shortening attention span, demands immediacy, and comedy is no different. It requires an urgency to its appeal, a simplicity to its narrative, and at the core of it, it has to make people laugh. Yet, in coalescence it needs a building of worlds that people want to come back to, one that they are compelled by and resonate with beyond the quips. “I think what’s frustrating is that the industry is pandering to an audience that wants easily digestible stuff,” Stamp says. “When the odd thing comes out that’s a bit more masterful in its creation, that always seems to have come from a place of one person that’s insisted on their vision and managed to get it through. And then everyone loves it. You just have to position yourself as someone who doesn’t want to [pander] and stick to your guns. Luckily with Peacock we’ve got a good team and a good production company that respect what we want to do. There’s a balance obviously; making it broad enough that it’s definitely a comedy and definitely accessible, but also not pandering to too much of the cheap stuff…” he pauses, “that said, we’ve got a load of fart jokes in there.”

Stamp was always something of a joker. The funny sibling (his brother and PR, Dave, agrees), his attempts with comedic scripting stem back to writing sketches and a short film in university days. The next period of his life was spent searching for a sharpened vision of the vague aspiration he obtained. “I was basically doing admin jobs and trying to be creative but not really knowing what it was that I wanted to do,” he reflects on his 20s. “I have a weird memory of being drunk with my parents when I was at uni and trying to explain to them what Mike Skinner was: how he talks from a place that’s relatable, and the way he talks how we talk. I wanted to write shit like that. Then when I got an opportunity to write scripts, I just was, like, ‘fucking yes, this is it.’ I just knew that was what I wanted to do.” The opportunity arose from his convergence with the other key tine’s of People Just Do Nothing. They met during the glory days of garage and grime surging to cultural preponderance; a group of wannabe DJs, producers, rappers and videographers immersed in the hype of the movement, from whom People Just Do Nothing and their fictional radio station Kurupt FM was conceived. What began as a YouTube series sprouted into a BBC pilot, and by its fifth and final six-pronged episodic series the show was a critically-adorned cult phenomenon that captured its epoch’s zeitgeist comprehensively.

From “people commenting on [their] YouTube videos being like, ‘get a fucking job and all this shit’,” to a legacy that delves far deeper than 10 second meme clips and easily recounted gags; People Just Do Nothing, Peacock, and anything else Stamp touches turns to comedy gold. His secret? Spontaneity, perhaps. “Comedy’s a mad art form because you’re trying to make people laugh, but the immediate people around you have seen you do it like eight times already. So you’re sort of having to try and not think about the fact that they’re bored of it and still have the same amount of energy to make somebody laugh somewhere. I never want the director to cut at the point where the script finishes. Let’s do some weird shit, then cut when the laugh happens.”

We exit into a late afternoon drizzle. With the starstruck bartender still lingering in my mind (who shyly returned to ask for a selfie), I ask the unassuming Steve Stamp: are you famous? “Marginally,” he contemplates, flinching at the weather. “But I think it’s a nice amount. It is cult classic, not bestseller-type famous – to quote the great Mike Skinner again. I don’t mind getting recognised because it’s for my work which is nice. But I don’t love the idea of not being able to go to a pub and have a chat with your mate or whatever. I don’t want to be in Soho House all the time.”