Until his last tour in 2014, standup fans associated Miles Jupp with a homely brand of bumbling Englishness. Then the worm turned, as Jupp laid into the moral squalor of Coalition-era Britain with a political bite few of us knew he had. For those, myself included, who hoped The Chap You’re Thinking Of heralded a new, gloves-off chapter in Jupp’s career, its follow-up Songs of Freedom must come as a slight disappointment. It pitches the Rev and Thick of It man squarely back in his comfort zone, where life is all about the tribulations of parenthood, the horror of hipsters and the pleasures of a nice hot bath.
Maybe that’s to be expected. He’s the new host of Radio 4’s News Quiz; BBC angst about political impartiality may be weighing on his shoulders. At any rate, tonight’s show stays strictly middle-of-the-road – which is a tricky place to be if you want to get anywhere. Its opening stages are slow and underpowered, as Jupp fantasises about the hot-tub he’ll be slipping into post-show, and weaves an attenuated anecdote about an unsatisfied punter at a recent Lincolnshire gig.
For half an hour, it feels like Jupp is still warming himself, and the audience, up. There’s a routine about his curse of politeness, whereby he showers waiters with thank yous for the merest courtesy. The same curse afflicts this mild-mannered show. Often the joke is meant to be Jupp’s impotent rage at life’s minor inconveniences: the replacement of buttons by touchscreens; being mistaken for a trainspotter. But the rage is too demurely expressed; we’re never persuaded that, really, Jupp is all that bothered.
Things pick up. By the time he’s waxing exasperated about the food served on trains, Jupp’s hit his groove. Elsewhere, we’re laughing not at the peevishness but at the urbane turns of phrase, as when our host describes a jobless actor friend plundering canapes to feed his family (“Blinis again, dad?”), or the removal man chez Jupp packing boxes as if the whole process was the aftermath of a row.
The friend story is otherwise weak: it flogs the man’s habit of lying about his job at parties until, comedically, it’s a dead horse. The house-move story takes Jupp and family to Wales, to escape the “cocktails in jars” makeover of their London neighbourhood. A closing set-piece finds Jupp reviewing restaurants in the gentrified East End: an engaging tale, if not one that’s exactly jam-packed with comic incident.
Only once does he venture a contentious opinion, as part of a rant against Prince Charles’s Duchy Originals line of biscuits – “a crunchy inducement to armed republican revolution”, as he calls them. It’s an amusing routine, but would be more so if he’d press less gingerly on its accelerator, or feel the need to excuse its politics. (“Republican rant over, Epsom…”) The show is, in short, a retreat for Jupp – into a diverting world of domestic indignities and worrying developments at WHSmith.
- At Wyvern theatre, Swindon, 14 September; Stafford Gatehouse, 16 September; and touring.
