Miles Jupp

In and Out of the Kitchen axed by BBC Four

Miles Jupp's In and Out of The Kitchen has been cancelled by BBC Four.

However, the culinary sitcom, in which Jupp plays the florid, neurotic food writer Damien Trench, will resume on Radio 4, with a fourth series recording later this month.

This is the episode in which Jeremy Clarkson was set to return fire on his erstwhile employers. It looks as if he's decided that discretion is the better part of valour, but with the election now only a fortnight away, whoever is invited along instead - it'll be Alexander Armstrong, won't it? [actually Stephen Mangan] - will have plenty to talk about. In JC's absence, Miles Jupp and Camilla Long will be picking up the slack alongside Merton and Hislop, who must have been hoping for some sort of Angus Deayton-style valedictory humiliation.

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.