Miles Jupp Is The Chap You’re Thinking Of

Hazlitt Theatre, Maidstone

Miles Jupp began his routine at the Hazlitt Theatre in Maidstone on Thursday night with a disclaimer.

He isn’t on any social network apart from MySpace and he’s trying to quit that, but says “you’ve got more chance of trying to leave a marriage to Charles Saatchi with your dignity and reputation intact.”

This sets the mood for the next two hours, the first of which he spends telling a packed house about his attempts to come to terms with physically being 35, having been middle-aged in his mind ever since he read the Telegraph as a 10-year-old.

He describes his four children, all of whom are aged under four, as his infant captors and says his love for them is akin to Stockholm Syndrome. Sounding like a survivor he ridicules the idea that parenthood can mellow an individual: “They haven’t mellowed, they’re broken!”

On leaving a successful gig he celebrates by tuning into the World Tonight and “turning up the bass” so that he can treat a mid-sized market town to the sound of contemporary current affairs.

With his quiff and thickset spectacles Jupp looked a bit like a cross between Eddie Cochrane and Alan Carr, although he often sounded like he was doing an impression of Hugh Grant’s wedding speech in Four Weddings and a Funeral (and if any Daily Mail readers are reading this, that isn‘t intended to be disparaging) .

After the interval spoke about his own brushes with fame in his previous incarnation as Archie the Inventor from Balamory, and as a non-speaking waiter in the Sherlock Holmes film (he didn‘t realise his lines had been cut until the premiere).

Jupp didn’t make any reference to his role in the satire “The Thick of It” where he brilliantly played the kind of individual every organisation has, whose colossal self-belief was in inverse proportion to his competence but there was a political theme running throughout.

It started with an admission that while he isn’t keen on everything the Germans have done in the last 100 years or so, he believes totalitarianism is the only way to cope with loading the dishwasher.

He also riffed about the tyranny of twitter and coffee and if all that sounds slightly safe he also made an arch reference to Maidstone being a “hotbed” of revolutionary activity before gently filleting the present government, like a non-smug version of Stewart Lee.

People hear Jupp’s Hampstead accent and assume he is a conservative. He admires their beautiful manners but is less keen on the way they want to punish people for “being unlucky to have a bidet in their house.”

Jupp himself deploys the knife with similarly lethal charm, keeping the audience onside throughout.

You can catch the self-styled “dishwasher fascist” at the Tunbridge Wells Trinity on Saturday, March 15.