Miles Jupp

His partner Anthony's courgette soup diet is upsetting the builders; rival cookery writer Trudie Wilson ("the tautly skinned presenter of Crap Yourself Younger") is threatening to sue over a Waitsbury's magazine column; and his agent insists on taking him to restaurants with names like Zeitgeist. Miles Jupp's radio sitcom, focusing on the eternally pained Damien Trench, makes the jump to TV with nary a hiccup, while retaining those useful fourth-wall-breaking recipes, such as roasted red pepper and crab bisque. A delight.

Radio Times review

Miles Jupp's comedy In and Out of the Kitchen is an occasional pleasure on Radio 4, where it works perfectly; it's a small, quiet, irresistibly intimate bourgeois sitcom centred on writer/creator Jupp's precious food writer Damien Trench and his easy-going boyfriend Anthony (Justin Edwards).

The translation to television in this brief (three-episode) series isn't particularly comfortable, maybe because the alchemy of some shows just works better on radio.

But never mind, it's always a pleasure to meet Trench, a self-absorbed foodie snob who's appalled by supermarkets, trendy restaurants and overly familiar waiters. As we join the Trench household, Damien is agonising about baking a cake for his builders and re-adjusting his principles to write a column for a "Waitburys" magazine. "I write it, they print it, no funny business," he instructs his agent.

Radio Times review

Reader, I LOL-ed. This is brilliant. For the third and final part of Jon Canter's blisteringly funny sitcom, time-travelling biographer James Boswell (Miles Jupp) meets Harold Pinter.

Harry Enfield is spot-on as the master of comic menace. There are a couple of obvious gags ("Would The Caretaker be different without the pauses?" "It would be... shorter.") but Canter writes with originality and depth.

Bizarrely, this would make an excellent introduction to Pinter's work. It's almost -- though it pains me to say it -- edutainment. Essential listening.

Radio Times review

Comedy writer Jon Canter's last radio hit was the engagingly barmy Believe It!, which invented a fantasy life for Richard Wilson of all people. In Canter's new series Dr Johnson's biographer Boswell (Miles Jupp) interviews historical figures (Sigmund Freud last week, Maria Callas today, Harold Pinter coming up).

It's reminiscent of the Sky Arts 1 series Psychobitches in which Rebecca Front did the same sort of thing. I preferred it because its sketch format didn't outstay its welcome. Here the material is stretched thinly over half an hour. But radio editor Jane Anderson thinks it's "a work of genius". You decide.

Radio Times review

What an absolute delight for the brain and the ears. This new series was created by Jon Canter (the freelance comedy writer who has worked with everyone from Fry and Laurie to Smith and Jones), stars the ludicrously vocally talented Miles Jupp, and tantalises the listeners with three impossible interviews.

Each week, James Boswell, the famous biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, travels through time to interview a historical figure he could never have met. This week it's Sigmund Freud, next up is Maria Callas and the series closes with Harold Pinter (played by Harry Enfield).

One cannot help feel pity for Boswell as every question, every response, every word he utters is immediately pounced upon and psychoanalysed by Freud (played to neurotic perfection by Henry Goodman). So much so that Boswell ends the interview believing he may well want to kill his father and sleep with his mother.

A work of genius.

Radio 4 is always trying to prove that it doesn't solely live in the world bounded by Waitrose, the Hay festival and this newspaper, but it can't help giving away the truth every time it broadcasts a comedy located on precisely those coordinates. The third series of Miles Jupp's In And Out Of The Kitchen was a note-perfect rendition of life in what they used to call at the BBC, "the hostility room". He plays Damien Trench, a celebrity chef who lives suspended between over-confidence and crippling insecurity and pretends not to have heard of anything or anyone more prominent than himself. Trench's swooning arias of condescension are interrupted for recipes which are accompanied by chopping, dicing and boiling sound effects. He always describes these recipes as "easy" despite the fact that they generally call for one ingredient only available by personal application to the sovereign or "a handful of duck meat from a leftover organic roast duck". Like the best radio comedy, In And Out Of The Kitchen has a music to it that keeps you coming back for a repeat listen.

The best radio show of 2014. Miles Jupp's comedy about a food writer is, by far, radio's tastiest dish.

Radio Times review

Miles Jupp joins David Mitchell's team tonight. Yes, Jupp and Mitchell, side by side at last - it's like a posh-comic supergroup. At one stage, as Mitchell is in the midst of a typically heated interrogation of an opponent, Jupp turns to him and murmurs, "David, even if you don't believe him, you don't need to be angry about it." At which Mitchell yells, "I'm trying to break him!"

Jupp also tells a brilliant story about having to tell neighbours that their cat had died, while he himself happened to have his face painted as a kitten. But in the end, it's one of those episodes that Lee Mack carries almost single-handed. When he's on this form, there's no one quicker.

Cast rehearse Neville's Island

Rehearsal photos have been released for the upcoming West End transfer of Tim Firth's comedy. Leading the cast of Angus Jackson's production are Adrian Edmondson, who is reprising his performance as Gordon from the original run in Chichester, Miles Jupp, Neil Morrissey and Robert Webb.

Review: Miles Jupp at Latitude

Jupp’s set did seem under-appreciated by this festival crowd, who tended to let sparkling lines wash gently over them, rather than reacting with the guffaws such brilliant writing deserved.