People Just Do climate activism: ‘We don’t have to all be Greta’s level – but we can make small changes’

Published

3 years ago

November 15, 2021

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David Attenborough has warned us. Scientists have long been warning us. Prince Charles has warned us, and Greta Thunberg and even Leonardo DiCaprio, too.

Now, it’s the turn of Allan “Seapa” Mustafa and Hugo Chegwin – better known as everyone’s favourite pirate radio broadcasters MC Grindah and DJ Beats, from Brentford’s Kurupt FM and the hit, BAFTA-winning mockumentary series People Just Do Nothing – to step up and raise awareness of the climate crisis facing the planet.

The pair recently released a special edition of their podcast, Chattin’ Sh*t, to highlight the problem, and say they want to encourage others who might feel overwhelmed by the noise to find out more about the small changes everyone can make.

Speaking to Sky News, they are the first to admit they might be unlikely poster boys for the issue, but hope they can perhaps offer a different perspective to the politicians and experts who made headlines during the COP26 summit.

“It was a good opportunity to actually learn ourselves and make [the discussion] slightly more relatable,” says Mustafa, on recording the podcast. “In my circle, anyway, it’s not a subject that you sit and talk about, but you do realise that you have to make little changes – like people using metal bottles now, not using plastic. There’s all these little things that it’s just generally become part of normal everyday culture to think about more.”

Chattin Sh*t To Save The Planet features the pair talking to Gen Z climate activist Francisca Rockey and learning about the effects of everything from fast fashion to food consumption. The episode came about following research by Virgin Media O2 and environmental charity Global Action Plan, which found that many young people – and young men in particular – feel excluded from the conversation on climate change or are reluctant to engage online, as they don’t feel knowledgeable enough to get involved or worry about being judged for their views.

“I guess it’s people not wanting to get things wrong, people not wanting to make themselves look stupid,” says Mustafa. “And now to add to that is, if you’re looking at public platforms, people not wanting to get cancelled, ousted for having the ‘wrong’ information, the ‘wrong’ opinion.

“I just feel like you’ll never learn unless you try to talk about it. And it’s not [necessarily] about making a conscious effort to sit down and stage a conversation, but just making it a normal thing that’s part of your everyday life so you start talking about it naturally.”

Chegwin admits to having been “naive” about climate change in the past, and in the episode is subject to some teasing from Mustafa about changing his habits.

Over Zoom, he proudly holds his metal water bottle aloft. “It’s small changes,” he says. “It’s getting an understanding. I’m naive to all of this stuff but now I do want to make a conscious effort. I do recycle.”

“We joke about the fact that Hugo doesn’t care and I do,” says Mustafa. “Obviously that’s just two best mates like terrorising each other. Really and truly, we’re both learning at the same time and trying to do what we can.”

But it’s this kind of conversation that is likely to encourage people who might feel they cannot relate to politicians and scientists, or feel preached to by mega-rich stars for whom money is no object.

“I think it’s good for anyone to talk about it,” says Mustafa. “But when you put the news on you [can] feel like you’re getting ploughed with all this information in a language that’s almost designed to alienate people, that’s what I don’t like. That’s what makes it sound like this [issue] that doesn’t relate to us, but it’s not – it’s something that humans have been doing to destroy the Earth slowly, and we are part of that, so we need to look at that and talk about it.”

Hopefully, Chegwin says, they can get the message across to an audience that may not otherwise be engaging. “We don’t all have to be on Greta [Thunberg’s] level,” he says.

“It’s a massive problem that’s affecting all humans,” says Mustafa. “You shouldn’t have to have PhD-level information just to talk about it, but that’s sometimes how you’re made you feel.”

When Chegwin posted details of the podcast to almost 100,000 followers on his Instagram account, one of the first comments that comes up underneath falsely claims that “climate change is a scam”.

“That’s precisely what I’m talking about,” says Mustafa. “In their mind it’s the government and in their mind it’s a conspiracy, and it’s not on.”

Climate change is undeniable, says Chegwin. “It’s obvious. There’s fires, the weather is… the seasons are dramatically different. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy. Unless [the government] has got a weather weapon, which I doubt.”

So what advice do the People Just Do Nothing stars give?

“It’s the obvious, really, like recycling,” says Chegwin. “Be conscious of plastic use, also things like fast fashion – don’t feel pressure from Instagram, the online world, that you can’t wear the same clothes again.”

“We’re not the all-knowing gods on this subject,” says Mustafa. “So start looking into it yourself, you know? But it’s stuff like, cycle when you can, walk… plastic is a huge [issue], just be conscious of it.

“I think it’s just little things that you can do, but I say make your own education on it, man. This is just a gateway.”

Chattin’ Sh*t To Save The Planet with Virgin Media O2 is available now on Apple, Acast and Spotify

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

2 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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'Music is back' as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

UK music sales hit a 20-year high of £2.4bn in 2024, helped by pop megastar Taylor Swift’s latest album, and driven by streaming and the vinyl revival, figures show.

Revenues from recorded music reached an all-time high, more even than at the peak of the CD era, according to annual figures from the digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

Total consumer spending on recorded music – both subscriptions and purchases – topped the previous record of £2.2bn in 2001, ERA said.

Takings from streaming services including Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon rose by 7.8% to a little over £2bn.

Almost £200m was spent on vinyl albums, an annual uplift of 10.5%, while CD album revenues were flat at just over £126m.

Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was the biggest-selling album of the year, aided by her record-smashing worldwide Eras tour.

More than 783,000 copies were bought, nearly 112,000 of them on vinyl – making it 2024’s biggest-selling vinyl album.

The biggest single of the year was Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, generating the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said 2024 was “a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume.

Ms Bayley called it the “stunning culmination of music’s comeback which has seen sales more than double since their low point in 2013. We can now say definitively – music is back.”

Despite the increasingly strong performance by the British music industry, artists are said to be receiving less money.

Experts have said the musicians make less than people would think because of the role of streaming – platforms do not normally pay artists directly and divide any owed payments among the rights holders of songs.

Music revenues grew by 7.4% in 2024, while video rose by 6.9%, and games fell by 4.4%, according to preliminary figures.

Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV grew by 8.3% to £4.5bn – almost 90% of the sector’s revenues.

Deadpool & Wolverine was the biggest-selling title of the year, with sales of 561,917 – more than 80% of them sold digitally.

Despite the games sector’s 4.4% decline last year, it remains nearly twice as large as the recorded music business.

Full game sales saw a drop-off with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console games down 15% and boxed physical games down 35%, in favour of subscription models which grew by 12%.

EA Sports FC 25 – formerly known as Fifa was once again the biggest-selling game of the year, generating 2.9 million unit sales, 80% of them as digital formats.

Entertainment

Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: ‘I’d automatically get defensive’

Published

11 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: 'I'd automatically get defensive'

Kieran Culkin says he doesn’t care if his projects get badly reviewed as long as he enjoyed himself doing them.

The 42-year-old recently won best supporting actor in a motion picture at the Golden Globes for his performance in A Real Pain.

He tells Sky News he isn’t dependent on positive feedback, but it is “cool” when people find a connection to his work.

“I’m doing this [acting] around 36 years. I’ve been sort of trained or whatever, conditioned, to just not care what an audience response is to something,” he says.

“I’ve been in plays that I think ‘this is bad, but I’m enjoying it’. I don’t really care or if it gets poorly reviewed, I don’t really care. So I still sort of have that mentality but it’s actually quite nice that people are connecting with [A Real Pain]. To hear people that have seen it say, I know a guy like Benji or talk about him, it’s like that’s what this feeling is”.

The Succession actor stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the film about cousins who take a trip to Poland to see the country their grandmother left.

Culkin says taking notes from a co-star, who also wrote and directed the film, was a new and challenging experience.

“That’s tough; it just is,” he says.

“[Jesse] would give me a note, my chest would puff up and I would automatically get really defensive, like, I’m gonna hit this guy.”

‘The biggest taboo on a movie’

Eisenberg says playing the role and being the filmmaker made him “nervous” because he sees actors giving notes to be the “biggest taboo on a movie”.

“You don’t give an actor notes – never do that. You can commit arson on a movie set before you can give an actor notes,” he says.

A Real Pain is set in Poland and is inspired by a real-life trip Eisenberg took with his now wife Anna Strout more than 20 years ago to retrace his family’s roots.

“Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” he says – and so looking at Poland and its history became a huge inspiration to him.

The Now You See Me actor first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013, and spent the decade redeveloping it to become the “buddy road trip” A Real Pain.

‘It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country’

The film weaves through the story of cousins reconnecting on their journey to visit, for the first time, their grandmother’s home before she was displaced during the Holocaust.

Eisenberg is currently in the process of gaining Polish citizenship and says his relationship with the country has changed over the years.

He says: “With Polish heritage, you grow up hearing that it was the site of the murder of all of your family and you hear that it’s bleak and especially if you’re a kid of the 80s and 90s like I am, you hear about bread lines from the Soviet era. And so going there was just unbelievably the polar opposite of what I had heard growing up.

“It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country and not only beautiful, warm and welcoming, but like what they did for me and allowed me to do, to tell my family’s story, to be able to shoot at a concentration camp, to be able to shoot on this very hallowed grounds of the various locations we were on was just amazing. I’m in such debt to them.”

‘I grew up knowing performance was normal’

A Real Pain looks at how a person’s family history can shape who they become.

Eisenberg says growing up with a mother who worked as a birthday party clown helped him see acting as an attainable career.

He says: “Every morning I saw this woman get dressed up in a ridiculous outfit and put on crazy face makeup and tune her guitar to the piano. So, I grew up knowing that performance was normal.

“I didn’t grow up thinking that people who perform are weird and actors are weird and why do they? You know, I grew up thinking to behave in this silly way can be a professional job.

“So it just stayed in me. And now what we do is kind of ridiculous, but we take it seriously.”

A Real Pain is in cinemas now.

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

14 hours ago