Comedian PHILL JUPITUS is probably best known for Never Mind the Buzzcocks, but it is as a stand-up that he made his name. JESS OWEN caught up with him during a break in a hectic tour schedule for his new show Juplicity.
“Eddie Izzard rang me up and told me I should do stand-up again about eight years ago. He phoned me while I was in a car park in Waitrose and he gave me a bit of a bollocking.”
He may not sound it, but Phill Jupitus is a modest man.
He is quite the all-rounder. Well-known as one of the team captains on quiz-show Never Mind The Buzzcocks, he started his career as a poet, has been a radio presenter, appeared in musicals, and even turned his hand to Shakespeare. Stand-up is his first love, however.
Jupitus is back with a new show Juplicity, appearing tonight at the Kings Hall in Ilkley. It’s his first time performing at the venue, and he has a little twist in store for the audience…
“From them arriving to them leaving, I’ll always be in the room,” he tells me. “I’ll be wandering around during the interval too chatting to people. It’s a new thing I’m trying out, so hopefully it’ll be quite a laugh. I’m in the building the whole time so why should I go and hide from the audience?”
The name of the tour comes from the title of a poetry show Jupitus performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2012: “It’s a made-up word that describes how my career has been, in that I have always done the poetry and stand-up, and those two things have always coexisted with each other.”
Jupitus says fans who know him from programmes like Never Mind the Buzzcocks and QI can expect an unfiltered version of how he is on television. “The first part of the show is me being my own support act doing poetry, then I do stand up in the second half. There’s also music.”
The show will be spontaneous. Jupitus has a playful nature and likes to switch things up from time to time: “Sometimes I’ll do the poems in a different order and that makes things go with a different energy. There’s two main chunks of the stand-up that I haven’t even done for about three weeks, so I might put them back in.”
Do his family mind being part of his show? “No, not really,” he says. “What I talk about is not really them. I talk about being a father and having children, and I mention them because I have them. I’m not talking about anything that others in the world haven’t experienced or dealt with. All I’m doing is taking my own life experiences and playing with the broad truths in my life.”
Jupitus describes himself as more of story-teller than a stand-up comic. The tour has made him realise this aspect of himself: “I come from that Irish story telling tradition. That’s how stand-up evolved, from that folk scene in the 1970’s with people like Jasper Carrott. They’re guys doing folk songs, but doing comedy in between.”
Since leaving the cast of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in February, Jupitus has been gigging around the UK. He has visited Australia and New Zealand, stopped off in Norway, Belgium, and Denmark, and the Scottish Highlands, before finishing with a month long stint at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
“The Edinburgh Fringe always gets you very sharp. I was doing five shows a day there, so I thought I was rather gig ready. This new tour Juplicity then started in early September.”
I wonder whether Jupitus favours certain parts of his career to others. He clearly enjoys being able to jump between disciplines. As an artist he is busy and successful, although he believes otherwise: “I don’t do enough to focus on one thing at a time. I leapfrog and when you’re leapfrogging you’re always jumping over something that maybe you should be doing.”
Jupitus and musical theatre are done, at least for the foreseeable future: “I give them 100%, but there comes a point when I’ve had enough,” he says. “However, I’m not completely adverse to it, if the right job comes along, with the right direction and the right team.”
Asked if there was anything he has not yet done that he would like to endeavour in future, his reply comes as a surprise. “I’m looking at doing Foundation Art next year,” he says. “I’ll have to see what the situation is and whether I can afford it, but it’s something I have always wanted to do.”
“The thing is, I don’t think about the career. I think about life.”
PHILL JUPITUS performs JUPLICITY at Kings Hall, Ilkley 8.00 pm on 6th November.