Affable stand up Miles Jupp is now best known as the passive aggressive pastor Nigel in hit comedy show Rev but his new live show reveals him to be a shameless blagger.
“Fibber in the Heat is the story of how I tried to become a cricket journalist on an England tour to India by means of simply pretending to be one. I decided if I got into the press box by pretending then eventually work would start coming in.
“I got various bits of papers saying I was working for BBC Scotland, and I had the promise of work from the Western Mail to write specifically about Welsh fast bowler Simon James which they would have paid for me.
“But one of the first things I discovered when I arrived was that Simon Jones had just got injured and was already on a plane back to the UK. From that moment on it stated to get a little tricky.”
But as the fake hack fumbled his way round the periphery of the test match world he found new respect for the journalists who actually do it for a living.
“It’s easy to listen to Test Match Special and think ‘gosh what an amazing life’ and jolly japes all day long. That is part of the attraction of the job, but it’s tremendously difficult, and people are working hard all the time which I’d naively not realised.
“It’s the same as comedians when people say ‘oh, he ad libs’ and looks so calm, without realising there are other things going on under the surface and work put in weeks in advance.
More recently Miles was seen on our screens when he unexpectedly made the final of the Let’s Dance for Comic Relief contest dancing as a very unlikely pop star.
“God, it is a shock to be sitting in a dressing room, and looking up into a mirror to see you’ve become Keith Flint from the Prodigy. The thing is I can’t really dance, and can’t a slow dance, so I said give me a tune I can go a bit nuts to and fling myself round to.
“It was a surprise to get to the final and, although Comic Relief do a lot of good work here and aboard. I was thinking that’s the arrangements for a friend’s baptism two weeks hence ruined thanks to bloody Iain Lee and Vic Reeves who voted me through.
“I did meet Eddie the Eagle which is a good reason to do it as you couldn’t meet a nicer, more level and lovely man.”
His brilliant Keith Flint caused some confusion in our house as my seven year old couldn’t work why Archie from Balamory was bounding around to Firestarter.
“Balamory was a long time ago but the stuff I really loved doing were the live shows which although they were done to a wall of noise were great fun.
“I did them off the back of doing the Edinburgh Festival where you are in a building that should have been condemned playing in front of sixty people, and month later you wall on at Sheffield Arena and 3000 people would cheer Archie.
I’m doing a sitcom at the moment and you learn eight pages a day ,but in Balamory we were doing 27 or 28 pages and a lot of it was quite surreal working with yoghurt pots.”
But in recent months Miles has been one of the stars of unlikely hit Rev charting the trials and tribulations of an inner city vicar, and the motley crew who test his faith. But was he surprised that it has been such a massive hit?
“You hope for that, and I was massively pleased to get that part, but sitting round table and seeing that cast then you think it would be a shame if this wasn’t good. The writer James Wood is tremendous and people like Simon McBurney, Olivia Coleman and obviously Tom Hollander as the Rev, and the way it was received was a relief.
“It is a game raiser but it’s not competitive, and it is very supportive, but I find watching Jimmy Akingbola who pays crackhead Mick fascinating. There’s a football scene in the second series and he kept attacking Steve Evets who plays Colin and pinning him down. I didn’t have any lines for three days but I spent whole time just laughing.
“I saw the onscreen stuff between Tom and Olivia which is really great and made me panic after the first series when I saw it and thought ‘shit, they are so naturalistic, they are really, really acting’.’
“The Christmas Special when she said she was pregnant I was reading the script and thought ‘god, wow’, and I found it very touching.”
So the million dollar question is for fans is really quite simple, will there be a third series of Rev?
“It’s an answer I can’t give you, I have no idea and in my head as a coping mechanism I am not thinking there will be one, so it’ll be a nice surprise if there were one.
“We’ve just been nominated for another BAFTA, but Tom and James spent a lot of time researching it which is really worth it, but it’s just whether they have that time.”
Miles Jupp is at Leeds City Varieties on Tuesday May 8. Tickets are still available on 0113 243 0808.