Miles Jupp The truth about why I left Radio 4’s ‘News Quiz’
Comedian Miles Jupp insists he quit Radio 4’s ‘News Quiz’ to spend more time with his family. By Anita Singh
Miles Jupp is telling a story so awkward it could have come straight from the book of “Very British Problems”. “I went to a restaurant last night, and the man was talking about people who had been in, and he said, ‘You’re an actor, aren’t you? What’s your name?’ But my natural voice is basically a mumble, and I am incapable of saying ‘Miles’. I have to say, ‘Erm, Miles.’ He said, ‘Sorry, what is it?’ I said again, ‘Erm, Miles.’ He said, ‘Emmaus?’ And so I said yes. When I left, he said, ‘Nice to meet you, Emmaus’.” Jupp looks stricken. “Why would you want to say your own name quite loudly in a restaurant?”
It’s not difficult to see why he is about to star in the West End as David Tomlinson, the man beloved by generations as George Banks in
Mary Poppins. The play The Life I Lead is written by James Kettle, who has described Tomlinson as representing “a certain kind of vanished Englishness”. Jupp is perfect casting. He is familiar to Radio 4 listeners as chair of The News
Quiz, a job he made the surprise decision to leave this year, and to stand-up audiences after two decades on the circuit. Television viewers may know him as Cousin Basil in The
Durrells, Nigel the lay reader in Rev, and press officer John Duggan in The
Thick Of It, performances which saw him running the “Englishman” gamut from cheerily bumbling to uptight to utterly confident in one’s own abilities, despite not having any.
The Life I Lead is a one-man play that explores Tomlinson’s personal life. The actor endured the tragedy of his first wife’s suicide, the trauma of finding out that his father had for years maintained a secret second family – a discovery made by chance when Tomlinson’s brother looked out of a bus window to see his father sitting in another house – and the challenge of raising a son with autism at a time when the condition was little understood.
This is not, though, one of those plays about the tortured genius behind the laughter. “No. Actually, I think he was sort of untortured, although he experienced great sadness,” says Jupp. “You might associate people of that generation with the stiff upper lip thing, but he faced his difficulties head-on. I think he made an effort to be jolly but not in a denial way. Just that you can be jolly if you choose to be.”
Tomlinson, who died in 2000, belongs to another era: “There’s a certain sort of old-fashionedness about him.” Some interviewers have attributed a fogeyish bent to Jupp, who turned 40 this month, but he is really not like that at all. He chats animatedly about Britpop and the time he went to the Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party.
Perhaps it’s the voice. Jupp is not screamingly posh but is well-spoken. “I suppose if you asked people who weren’t British, ‘What are British people like?’, they might describe someone who was a bit like me. I know I seem posh. And I sort of don’t mind that, really because none of that’s up to you anyway. It’s just a thing you’re given, and pretending you’re not like you are seems to be slightly odd behaviour.”
He found a berth on that most middle-class of stations, BBC Radio 4, succeeding Sandi Toksvig as host of The News Quiz in 2015. It was “a great job”, he says. So why quit? It turns out there were several reasons. “If you’re in charge of something, it’s not as fun as being on it,” he admits. “There’s a certain amount of information you have to get across. You have to pretend to have opinions about things that you have no opinions on whatsoever, and you have to pretend not to have opinions about things that you do have opinions on. So you end up in a slight kind of flux.”
He worried that chairing duties meant he was “not being terribly creative”. Jupp says: “If you watch someone like Nish [Kumar] on The
Mash Report or John Oliver, sitting behind a desk talking about the news and making jokes, you think, ‘That is what they really want to be doing.’ And if I’d hear myself, I’d think, ‘Well, I sound like someone who happens to be hosting the The News Quiz …’ So after about three years, I thought I should probably stop.” The news cycle got pretty wearing: “The same topics came up rather often, and I’d think, ‘Am I saying the same words in a different order?’ ”
The death of longtime regular Jeremy Hardy was another factor. “Once I knew Jeremy was so unwell, I didn’t really like the idea of doing the show as he wouldn’t be in it any more. Every now and then, a recording would find itself going down this cul-de-sac, and you’d think, ‘I know what this evening needs…’, and there’s no way it can happen.”
As for criticism that The News Quiz was too Left-wing, Jupp brushes it off: “Who is sitting at home thinking, right, I’m about to be told facts for 30 minutes solid?
“To worry about [bias] means to not credit the audience and listenership with a great deal of intelligence.” He shrugs: “In terms of political balance, I was never really bothered about it because that’s not the job of that programme. It’s just jokes.”
Now he is off the show and free to talk about his own politics. So, is he a Tory? “No, I am absolutely not a Tory. I have never, ever put a cross in that box.” That’s not to say he’s a Jeremy Corbyn fan, either.
He imagines their conversation: “I’m happy to vote for you, but can you just tell me – it doesn’t have to be an essay – what it is that I’m voting for? Can you just say vaguely what it is you actually think?”
Jupp also says he left The News Quiz because he wanted to spend time with his family, which from a politician would sound like a lie, but from a man with five children sounds eminently reasonable.
He lives in Monmouth with his wife, Rachel, whom he met at university in Edinburgh (a period when he also found fame as Archie in the BBC children’s show Balamory). Their eldest is now 10, the youngest four, with an eight-year-old and seven-yearold twins in between. I imagine the logistics are quite something.
“The rules of my local leisure centre make it possible for me to take four children swimming at a time, and we do that without much difficulty.
“It’s as difficult sometimes as people imagine, and as fun sometimes as people imagine. But you do have to have a f------ big car.”
What of the Duke of Sussex’s recent pronouncement about having only two children to save the planet?
“Is that what he thinks? Um, well, it’s a bit late really … we’ll try to offset it somehow. I’ll get them to wear solar backpacks.”
Jupp has heard the environmental argument many times. “If I had a herd of cows, would you be saying to me, ‘Hmm, now, you must have heard that cows are quite bad for the environment?’” He’s giggling now. “If you interviewed a Formula One driver, would you say, ‘You know, it’s actually better to drive a little bit slower just in terms of fuel efficiency…’?” Rather than the weekly travel that
The News Quiz entailed, Jupp now plans to spend longer stretches at home. And to concentrate on acting and writing. He is working on a novel about a man in his 30s who is disillusioned with his job – no, not presenting The News Quiz but teaching. And he would love to take
The Life I Lead to the US.
“You could do it in America, on the east coast or the west coast. Or Des Moines.” Then he checks himself. “I mean, I’m totally flying kites here. The producer may well be reading this and thinking, um, no. This is definitely the last time he’s doing it.”
‘I know I am posh, so pretending I’m not would be slightly odd behaviour’
‘I was never really bothered about political balance... It’s just jokes’