‘I was deported for being drunk on a plane’
Julia Llewellyn Smith meets comic Miles Jupp ahead of his debut in ‘The Durrells’ and finds plenty of mischief behind the bonhomie
Miles Jupp, the actor, comedian and host of BBC Radio 4’s The News
Quiz, can’t help but betray how very well brought up he is. Describing his latest role as Cousin Basil in the latest series of ITV’S much-loved period drama The Durrells, he says: “I’m the family’s cousin and a solicitor, and very kindly they ask me to do some legal work.”
That “very kindly” is telling. It smacks of precisely the sort of background you’d expect from the son of a United Reformed minister, although Jupp, despite studying divinity at Edinburgh University, is a non-believer. Initial impressions also bring to mind a Boris-Johnsonish young fogey. It’s something to do with the 38-year-old’s ruffled, if fast-vanishing, hair, smattering of stubble, shabby clothes and beaten-up walking boots (we’re sitting in ITV’S glossy headquarters) and the diffident, mumbling manner of speech.
Yet, like Johnson, the buffoonish exterior conceals indomitable drive. For Jupp has recently been ubiquitous on our TV screens. In the past year he’s popped up variously in the film Journey’s End, and the TV series Howard’s End and
The Crown (“Gosh, that was really
nice”).
Soon we’ll hear him in the animated TV adaptation of Watership Down, alongside Ben Kingsley and Gemma Arterton, as the voice of the cunning rabbit Blackberry. The BBC and Netflix, which have adapted the novel into a four-parter, had to reassure audiences that their version would not be as “brutal and terrifying” as the 1978 film, whose gory scenes were credited with traumatising a generation.
“I found the original film absolutely harrowing, I could not have been more than about six when some friends of my parents said ‘Would you like to watch a cartoon?’ I said, ‘I’d love to’; two hours later you’re going ‘What have they done?’”
Now in its third season, The
Durrells, with its plots about tripping over dogs and kitchen malfunctions, is significantly less traumatising. “No, this is family viewing. It’s Sundaynight TV, which is a genre in itself,” says Jupp. “With Tuesday-night drama you want to stand by the water cooler the next day saying, ‘Ooh, wasn’t that riveting?’ whereas on Sunday you want to say, ‘We had the washing-up done just in time to watch The
Durrells. Wasn’t that a nice way to finish the week!’”
He appears in two episodes, one based in London and one “luckily for me” in Corfu, but would “love”, he says, glancing at our silent ITV minder, to feature in future series. He’d also love to play against bumbling, good-egg, type, ideally as a baddy – “A Doctor Who or Bond villain” – or at the very least an American. “When I was auditioning for The
Monuments Men with George Clooney, I prepared a speech in an American accent, but they said ‘Can you do an English one as well?’ ”
In fact, if Jupp can be pigeonholed at all, it’s for playing gay men such as the pedantic (and closeted) Nigel in the Bafta-winning sitcom Rev, and Damien Trench, the homosexual cookery writer, whose flowery recipes contrasted with his tetchy character in his self-created radio (and briefly BBC Four) sitcom In
and Out of the Kitchen. Jupp admits the latter character was partly inspired by the openly gay wordsmith Nigel Slater, although there was also “a bit of Elizabeth David [and] a bit of [also gay writer] Simon Hopkinson.”
Jupp is every bit as charming and polite as you’d expect from someone who projects such a quintessentially English image, but there’s also a prickly edge to him. When he googles himself to check a fact, he exclaims exasperatedly: “Look what comes up! ‘What are the names of Miles Jupp’s children?’ I mean, this f------ country!”
When I ask – jokingly – if he has any youthful indiscretions to rival Theresa May’s running through wheat fields, he unexpectedly reveals: “I was deported from the US for being drunk on a plane.” Disappointingly, time runs out before he can reveal more.
His children (he has five, all under the age of eight) and the financial cushion of a regular gig was one of the reasons he was attracted to Friday night’s The News Quiz after Sandi Toksvig stepped down three years ago. He was not prepared, however, for the flak that accompanies chairing a BBC current affairs programme, with constant accusations of both Left-wing and Right-wing bias.
“I didn’t think about it,” Jupp sighs, arms folded defensively. “I thought, ‘You’ll write jokes about the news.’ I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I’ll have to discuss dealing with the political aspects of the BBC’. I’m not saying it’s not been interesting, but all that hadn’t occurred to me.”
He continues looking agitated, twisting one knee over the other, when I ask how the BBC monitors the show for bias. “I know people love to think the BBC is full of people counting the number of jokes about Labour compared to the Tories, but it’s not like that,” he sighs, not fully explaining how the process works. “I’m not involved in the reckoning side of things but to leave something in or take it out purely for the appearance of balance would appear to me to be a shame. There’s a big difference between balance and impartiality. You shouldn’t actually be looking at things from a balance point of view, you should be thinking ‘What are the funniest things?’
“I actually think the whole conversation is a bit silly. Clearly [political] bias exists and it’s actually more problematic when you pretend it doesn’t. It’s easier when you have a comedian like Jeremy Hardy who says, ‘Yes, I am Left-wing’ and that is completely transparent.”
Understandably, Jupp won’t reveal his politics, but he’s certainly been instrumental in tackling the much-bewailed lack of diversity on panel shows, by ensuring The News Quiz has a new 50/50 ratio of male to female panellists.
He’s also given the programme a harder edge, refusing to dodge upsetting stories. “The only time we said ‘we cannot talk about this’ was after the Manchester bombing. We don’t want to make jokes about the Jimmy Savile inquiry, but if that’s something that’s happened we need to be discussing it.”
This current-affairs beat is in sharp contrast to his stand-up, which draws heavily on the travails of parenthood (the family live in Monmouthshire; his wife, Rachel, is a stay-at-home mother).
Does Rachel mind him mining their family life for jokes?
“I couldn’t do my comedy without my wife,” he says. “People say she doesn’t work but one of the funniest things in my last show was a verbatim report of something she said, so she’s making a massive contribution.”
He’s also milked his “poshness”, dressing up in cords and tweeds when he started stand-up as a student at Edinburgh University.
“I’ve been in stand-up dressing rooms and there would be someone that’s notably posher offstage than on and you’d think ‘hang on’. Your background is something over which you have no control whatsoever, so to deny it would be very odd.”
Television presenter Ben Fogle recently complained he’d been passed over for jobs because of his Sloaney accent.
“Fogle’s doing all right!” Jupp laughs. “Sometimes you are just not what they are looking for. But the reverse happens a bit more. I most certainly don’t feel discriminated against.” Except, of course, when it comes to playing villains and Americans.
The Durrells continues on Sunday at 8pm on ITV
‘People think the BBC is full of people counting the number of jokes about Labour compared to the Tories, but it’s not like that’