Brendan Dempsey

Radio Times review

Miles Jupp's amuse-bouche of a comedy about cookery writer Damien Tench is the lightest of farces. This episode revolves around the struggles of Damien's partner Anthony to keep the pernickety Tench out of the kitchen so he can prepare him a Valentine's Day meal in peace. Damien has a reason to stay away as he has to, in scenes reminiscent of W1A, finish the script for his Sky Arts series Poets and Their Palates.

Anyone who's ever read a food column will chortle over Damien's affected culinary musings, but his trip to a builder's merchant with his no-nonsense builder Mr Mullaney (Brendan Dempsey) is a special delight of awkwardness.

David Crawford, Radio Times, 18th March 2015

In and Out of the Kitchen (***), created and written by Miles Jupp, was first heard on Radio 4, a delightful spoof of celebrity chefs and our modern obsessions with food and having the perfect kitchen. Now Jupp and director Mandie Fletcher have brought it to television.

Jupp plays Damien Trench, a food writer obsessed with good nosh, who lives with his partner, Anthony (Justin Edwards), an ex-banker now looking for a job. They're chalk and cheese; Damien has a range of sharp shirts and woolly cardigans, while Anthony spends most of his time loafing around the house in his pants or pyjamas. For him food is merely a fuel, not something to be described in loving detail before every mouthful is savoured; last night Anthony was making a foul-smelling courgette soup as part of his fad diet.

The voiceover of the radio show is maintained here, with Damien doing straight-to-camera pieces as he describes a few days in what he thinks is a busy life but in fact is not; last night's biggest task was baking a simple birthday cake while avoiding his scary agent Iain (Philip Fox), who had the episode's best joke - a wonderful payoff to a running gag about "Salman Rushdie".

It's a life in which nothing ever quite works out to plan, except his delicious recipes, which are given in each programme. (Last night is was crab bisque and Victoria sponge.) The laconic Irish builder, Mr Mullaney (Brendan Dempsey), meanwhile, is working on a succession of jobs in the house with his young assistant Steven (Ade Oyefeso), while Damien's new magazine column for Waitsbury's lands him in legal difficulties. It's lo-fi comedy in which fart gags are set up but not delivered, as it were.

Part of the pleasure of listening to a radio show is in conjuring up the world described (including the never-ending building work and the awful restaurants Iain insists on taking Damien to); here we have it all done for us and I'm not sure it adds to the comedy, and it jars that Damien and Anthony's relationship seems rather tetchier here. But In and Out of the Kitchen is enjoyable enough - and the recipes are cracking.

Veronica Lee, The Arts Desk, 12th March 2015

Review: 'Very Best in Stand Up'

Review of Maff Brown, Brendan Dempsey, Angela Barnes and David Longley.

Nantwich News, 8th November 2014