Miles Jupp

Rules for Living, National's Dorfman Theatre, review

Rules for Living at times borders on being the funniest and truest comedy I've seen in ages, but it's also the strangest and most strained. It shouldn't really work at all. That it does, just about, is a testament to the talented array of actors that director Marianne Elliott has assembled - among them Deborah Findlay, Miles Jupp and Stephen Mangan - and the bravura bonkers nature of playwright Sam Holcroft's conceit, which boasts a hefty Big Idea even if it almost capsizes itself.

Miles Jupp is not Belgian

The comedian thought he knew about his Flemish roots - but as he reveals in a new radio show, he couldn't have been more wrong...

Radio Times review

Food writer Damien Trench's partner Anthony thinks they should get a lodger. But prissy Damien (Miles Jupp, who also writes In and Out of the Kitchen) is anxious about toilet arrangements, among other things: "A lodger would be an imposition, they'd upset my rhythm, my domestic ebb and flow."

It's the final episode in a very brief (three-episode) adaptation of the Radio 4 original, and though In and Out will never set the world on fire, it's sweetly funny and occasionally barbed, if a bit underpowered. And there's too much of Damien's needy literary agent. But when it's just Damien and Anthony squabbling at home about laundry or the builders, it's a wee gem.

Radio Times review

In Jonathan Coe's excellent 2013 novel Expo 58, 30-something protagonist Thomas accepts a work placement in Belgium, the country of his mother's birth. It's with heartfelt intensity that he looks forward to visiting the place where she grew up. Miles Jupp may well have been equally excited as he booked a passage across the North Sea to meet the relatives, convinced that his forebears were Huguenots no less.

But then his Belgian Who Do You Think You Are?-type crusade went awry. Family folklore is prone to increasing exaggeration. My grandmother was certain her ancestor was a former Bishop of Bath and Wells. As in Jupp's case, a little research and the illusion was shattered.

Rules for Living review

Stephen Mangan and Miles Jupp are a joy.

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.

Miles Jupp on being too posh for comedy

A posh voice and a penchant for tweeds held back comedian Miles Jupp -- then he found fame in The Thick Of It. Now the National Theatre calls.

In and Out of the Kitchen transfers from Radio 4 not wholly successfully, but there's ample time enough yet and Miles Jupp is amply talented enough to make it very funny indeed. The conceit - a mildly pompous cookery writer, puttering with amiably passive aggression between boyfriend, agent and deadlines - works well enough but, seen in real-time rather than radio-imagined, it is just so relentlessly London middle-class as to be both its main point and chief drawback. The recipe asides work wonderfully well: the agent's predictable Salman Rushdie phone-gags work as well as avocado cheesecake.

In and Out of the Kitchen is another scion from radio that was pleasing to ear and eye without ever being particularly funny. It owed a debt to The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester's exquisite first novel about a pompous gourmand. Damian Trench is not (yet) a mass murderer like Lanchester's Tarquin Minot, but he is another florid stylist who takes his grub seriously. You sense his creator, Miles Jupp, takes comedy seriously too, as this was as carefully assembled and composed as the most exacting recipe from Le Gavroche. Occasionally Trench spoke directly to camera, occasionally there were some (rather beautifully filmed) recipe sequences, but this was capable modern sitcom, capably presented.

Trench was a snob. Almost every great comic creation is, because the gap between the snob's view of themselves and how they're viewed by others is full of comic possibilities. Unfortunately Trench's snobbery, in episode one, was particular - he couldn't abide posh restaurants or fad diets and he refused to moderate his copy for a new column in "Waitsbury's" magazine. I suspect this makes him a snob to whom few can relate, and that In and Out of the Kitchen will remain a niche pursuit. Any sitcom reliant on a running gag about Salman Rushdie has probably found its natural berth on BBC Four.

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.