Miles Jupp

Miles Jupp interview

Miles Jupp has had an eventful year. He and his wife Rachel had their fifth child, they've moved from London to south Wales, he's performed at the National Theatre, can be seen in the film The Last Sparks Of Sundown, and from next month he's the new host of The News Quiz on Radio 4.

Radio Times review

While Vicious nabbed all the publicity (much of it deploring its dated script and braying studio audience) another series about a mature gay male couple was pootling along nicely.

In and Out of the Kitchen begins its fourth radio series after a brief BBC Four outing earlier this year. Here, stereotyped bitchiness is replaced by beautifully delivered sarcasm as world-weary cookery writer Damien (Miles Jupp) is gently chided by his banker partner Anthony (the show's writer Justin Edwards). Dare one say that this is intended for a more discerning audience?

In the first episode Damien agonises over whether to accept an offer to present a downmarket TV show about street food. Comedy no longer produces people capable of sophisticated repartee? Far from it.

Review: The Last Sparks of Sundown

TVO can only hope that the film's initial run - at one admittedly fantastic cinema in that there London - is followed up with a wider release, perhaps buoyed by the presence of Miles Jupp, Kayvan Novak and the voice of British TV legend Geoffrey Palmer as the tale's not-so-humble narrator. If, in this world of web-cam superstars we need to get a little slaggy to sell a movie to audiences, so be it: because this is a film that audiences should see. And hopefully, most of you will.

Miles Jupp: 'I hope the BBC survives scrutiny'

"Well, I hope [the BBC] survives," he said. "I don't really know how the BBC is run. Which isn't a despairing 'I just don't know how to bloody do it!', it's literally 'I don't know how it works'.

Miles Jupp received Radio 4's greatest honour, a place on the panel of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, on Monday. He made his Radio 4 chairing debut three weeks ago on the current panel game It's Not What You Know (a grim trot round the circuit of comedy clichés) and is heir to the chair on The News Quiz. His breakthrough Clue moment came when playing a duck buzzer (the plastic toy that sounds like a kazoo but madder). His performance was exact in phrasing, rigorously executed. The fact that no one guessed the song he was performing ("Let It Go", from the movie Frozen) proved he understands the heart of this show. Now where do I get a duck buzzer...

Sandi Toksvig bid The News Quiz (Radio 4, Friday) farewell this week. She had been with the show for nine years, 28 seasons and 222 episodes, which is a good innings by anyone's account. Dressed in tuxedos, her panel - Jeremy Hardy, Francis Wheen, Andy Hamilton, Phill Jupitus - looked like something from the early days of BBC Radio, and put in a relatively subdued performance. Like them, I'll miss her laugh, her ability to poke fun at herself, her infectious good nature. But I'm also intrigued to see whether Miles Jupp, named as her successor in this week's announcement, can breathe new life into a series that has become rather cosy and unsurprising of late.

Radio Times review

Miles Jupp returns as the jovial host, who manages to slip in some boundary-pushing quips - gasps from the audience on one occasion - under the guise of his apparently gentle delivery.

His guests are also comical - Sarah Millican, Nathan Caton and Richard Osman. But the biggest laughs come from the answers given by the three individuals they have nominated as people who know them really well. Millican selects her friend Lou (a fellow comic); Caton picks on, quite literally, his younger brother; and Osman chooses his mother, whom he claims for most of the show is using her "posh" voice, the one she favours when she answers the telephone.

It's akin to a re-versioned Mr And Mrs, with friends and family members instead of spouses, but it's a damn sight funnier - even potatoes get a laugh.

Edinburgh preview: Andrew Watts

The title might have a nod to Caitlin Moran, the middle class attitudes might have a whiff of early Miles Jupp, but Watts is growing into a comedian of some stature in his own right.