With five (very) young children and a new tour on the road, Rosanna Greenstreet enjoys a rare quiet moment with comedy man, Miles Jupp ahead of his performance at Epsom Playhouse September 13
David Secombe
Astronauts, social media, hipsters, manners and poo are topics that Miles Jupp is planning to ruminate upon in his new one-man show, which comes to Epsom this month. But, when we meet for coffee at London’s Soho Theatre bar just after the referendum, there is just one subject on his mind: Brexit.
“Given everything that’s just happened, my show seems like a load of self-indulgent nonsense,” says Jupp, “I mean, everything will be seen through the filter of Brexit for quite a long time, and I am not sure what that filter will do to a show like this, which is a man moaning about stuff. The show is called Songs of Freedom. That is not a reference to Britain leaving the EU; it’s jokes and stories, and there is a sense of trying to get a handle on one’s own identity. I say one’s identity – but I mean mine.”
There’s that impeccable comic timing. It’s no surprise that since he hit the stand-up comedy scene in 2000 with his brand of gentle, self-deprecating humour, Jupp has become one of the nation’s best-loved funny men. He is known for playing characters such as the tortured lay preacher Nigel in the BAFTA award-winning television series Rev, and for hosting Radio 4’s long-running topical quiz show The News Quiz, a role that he inherited last year from another formidable funny person, Sandi Toksvig.
I wonder how Jupp will balance The News Quiz with a tour taking him the length and breadth of the country, and lasting until the end of next February.
“Doing The News Quiz, you are up to your eyes in politics for a certain number of days of the week and on the tour there will be larking about and silliness, so one will be a refresher from the other,” he explains.
Today Miles, who turns 37 this month, is sporting his trademark look: middle-class dad in chinos and Boden-esque patterned shirt. Clothes, namely a freshly ironed shirt and what he refers to as ‘robust’ trousers, are key to his performance.
“I like to iron my own shirt before I go on stage,” he says. “It’s a ritual, a reminder that I am going to work, like someone in the City ironing their shirts on a Sunday night. You have a light supper, you iron a shirt – trousers are required, too - and then you walk on stage and do a show.”
David Secombe
While he is criss-crossing the country, his wife, Rachel, will remain at home in Wales with the little Jupps – all five of them.
“Maybe that’s what my show is about – being tired,” he muses. “I have one girl and four boys and the oldest is seven, so it’s bonkers. I spend a lot of time appealing for calm, and I wonder if I could achieve some sort of inner calm, then I wouldn’t need an atmosphere of calm. My wife remains un-irritated by things that drive me absolutely mental, which has obvious consequences.
“We live where my wife is from. We were in Peckham before and by the time we were going to have our fifth, we knew we were going to have to move. Much of my work is fun and worth travelling for, so I said to my wife, ‘You choose where we move to.’ I thought that she would say Catford or Kent, but she said Monmouthshire.”
He adds, diplomatically: “It’s very nice. We live in a town. I can walk to a branch of Iceland – always handy, to get milk, a range of bottled ales...”
Jupp was raised in London where his father was a minister with the United Reformed Church. Both Miles and his older brother, Ed, were educated at St George’s School in Windsor.
“I started there when I was nine,” he says, “I became obsessed with the idea of going to boarding school. It must have been from a book.
“Eventually, we were in the car going somewhere and I was banging on about it and my parents said, ‘We might as well tell you, you are going to boarding school.’
“My brother and I were livid! I imagine our parents were sitting in the front thinking ‘What? We have actually done what they asked!’”
It was at St George’s that Jupp first discovered that he was funny.
“When I was 10, there was a concert in the school gym where I played the clarinet badly. I couldn’t keep up with the piano and I just kept making this appalling squeak. I created this terrifying atmosphere that was profoundly awkward for everyone. I could hear someone – presumably someone’s older sister – say, ‘Oh, my God, look at his eyes,’ and I thought as I was playing, ‘I wonder what my eyes are doing?’
Presumably they were providing some running commentary for the audience, saying, ‘Listen we all know what’s happening here but I am powerless to stop it!’
David Secombe
“When I got to the end, I just laughed and laughed and laughed, and everyone clapped and laughed, too. I must have had an instinctive awareness that I had created some catastrophe and that everything hinged on my response.”
Jupp went on to study Divinity at Edinburgh University where, during his degree, he did some stand-up and also played the inventor Archie in Balamory, a kids’ television show. But it was later, in 2009, that he found fame when he was cast as the clueless press officer John Duggan in The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci’s satire of Westminster, which became cult viewing.
Throughout his career, Jupp has landed small parts in big movies, such as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, George Clooney’s The Monuments Men and this summer’s blockbuster, The Legend of Tarzan, in which he plays a butler.
Currently, he is working on a new BBC animation of the classic novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, which is due for broadcast next Christmas, in 2017.
“I am voicing Blackberry,” he explains. “You get filmed while you do it, so that can inform the animation. So ultimately, there will be a rabbit that is physically reminiscent of me, probably a tired-looking rabbit which keeps sighing and saying ‘Oh Christ,’ when he thinks no one can hear.”
And with that, Jupp’s eye is drawn to his tour schedule which lies on the table between us. “Look at all these dates,” he says, “What was I thinking?”
But give that man a crisp shirt and a pair of chinos, and I feel sure he’ll get a second wind!
Miles Jupp is at the Epsom Playhouse Sept 13; epsomplayhouse.co.uk
Check out our interview section for more great pieces with local celebrities, like our recent chinwag with The Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates on all the latest articles
