In And Out Of The Kitchen

Radio award for In And Out Of The Kitchen

Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards' Radio 4 sitcom In And Out Of The Kitchen has been honoured at the BBC Audio Drama awards.

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.

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.

The delicious In and Out of the Kitchen has returned for a third series, featuring once again the ups and downs of the waspish cookery writer and broadcaster Damien Trench (Miles Jupp), whose great expectations are perennially, and hilariously, thwarted.

In the first episode, our hero is up for an award for his radio documentary, Poets and Their Palates. Unable to persuade his partner Anthony, or anyone else, to accompany him, he ends up taking his mother (Selina Cadell), who becomes the focus of a leering French author.

Trench is already a classic comedy character, quietly aspiring to high-flying media sophistication while everything and everybody conspires to bring him down to earth with a bump. Jupp's beautifully judged writing and pinched delivery are a joy.

Radio Times review

Miles Jupp's pointedly witty comedy is soon to transfer to the televisual medium, with BBC Four planning to show a series in spring, but for now it returns to the airwaves in its original aural incarnation. So savour your mental images of food writer Damien Trench's collection of coffee-making utensils and gadgets, before they are shrunk to a single espresso machine to fit within the confines of a TV screen.

As we join Damien at the start of series three, he's still got the builder Mr Mullaney working on his kitchen extension but there is good news - he's just been nominated for a Melvyn award for his TV series Poets and Their Palates, in the category Best Factual Programming in a Historical Context for a Digital Channel. Naturally his sworn nemesis - though Damien would claim there's absolutely no enmity between them - Ray Jarrow will be presenting the award.

Jupp's comic creation is a pompous melange of condescending pretensions, thwarted ambitions and self-delusion - a kindred spirit to one of the greatest sitcom asses, Dr Frasier Crane. I can think of no higher praise.

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The return of Miles Jupp's gently stinging chronicle of the career of minor cookery writer Damien Trench. In this episode, his programme Poets And Their Palates has been nominated for a Melvyn. Or Best Factual Programming Within A Historical Context For A Digital Station, to be exact. He's thrilled, of course, but he has to pretend that he isn't, which is the true mark of the media tribe. Radio 4 does this kind of Islington navel-gazing very well, as sitcom Ed Reardon's Week has already proved.

An interview with Miles Jupp

Miles Jupp explains how he created cookery writer Damien Trench and the world of In And Out Of The Kitchen.