MILES Jupp's stand-up show Songs Of Freedom is “a rant about me, you, domestic imprisonment, fatherhood, having to have opinions, hot drinks, the government, bad balance, housing, ill health, the ageing process, navigation and other people's pants”.
If that strikes you as a long list of reasons to be fretful, Jupp says: "Oh, I'm not a fretter. More a despairer.” Nevertheless the modern world can "discombobulate" him, he admits, ahead of his York Barbican date on February 22.
“I can get angry very, very quickly about inanimate objects, particularly if they don't do what I want them to do,” says 37-year-old Jupp, recalling an incident at the Welsh Borders house he shares with wife Rachel and their five children.
“We've just had a new boiler put in and I can't operate it. I've read the instructions but it's got this enormous control panel and I don't understand it, or for that matter why it makes the radiators come on at 3am. The man who installed it has to come back and talk us through it.
“And now we have bought a smart TV and, after not having had a television for eight years, it's all slightly baffling. It's the equivalent of going on a yoga retreat and in the intervening time the industrial revolution has happened. 'What's going on? I don't know how to use a loom'."
Inevitably, Jupp's seven-year-old son understands perfectly how the TV works. "But I can't very well go and wake him up at midnight and say, 'We want to watch Peaky Blinders, come and find it for us'.”
Should you be thinking that this comedian, actor and writer is a man born out of his time, he goes on to wax lyrical over the reversing camera in the family car. “It's just brilliant,” he says. “It's just that I am slightly out of kilter with the modern world and I do come at things from a different angle sometimes.”
Miles Jupp's tour poster for Songs Of Freedom
Will Songs Of Freedom feature material about his young family? “Why talk about something as wonderful as my children when I could be talking about something completely pointless? The show can be summed up as: 'I don't tweet, but I write down things that ought to be a tweet, and here they are',” he says of a show that promises a wry take on life.
Initially making his name "a long time ago" by playing Archie the Inventor in CBeebies' Balamory, Jupp heads out on the second leg of his 2016-2017 tour with his profile boosted anew by his role as host of BBC Radio 4's topical comedy show The News Quiz. “I love working as part of a team, and I hope people listening get some sense of me as a person, rather than just some bloke capable of reading stuff out loud,” he says.
Jupp is the son of a United Reform Church minister and studied Divinity at Edinburgh University, no doubt a useful resource for starring as fusspot Nigel in the BBC's ecclesiastical comedy Rev. His acting career has taken in further roles as Captain Fanshaw in Gary Tank Commander, John Duggan in The Thick Of It and minor-celebrity cookery writer Damian Trench in Jupp's self-penned BBC show In And Out Of The Kitchen.
Although In And Out is now over and out for the Beeb, Jupp is writing a spin-off book, Egg And Soldiers: A Childhood Memoir (With Postcards From The Present) by Damien Trench, for publication on July 27.
This year too, Jupp will be appearing as Blackberry in the upcoming new adaptation of Richard Adams's Watership Down for the BBC, joining a star-studded cast that includes Sir Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton and John Boyega from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Although he usually finds himself cast in posh or clever chap roles, Jupp would relish playing a baddie. "You would get to cut loose and say bad things,” he says. “You can be unpleasant without having to apologise for it."
For now, however, he will content himself with railing against modern life's multiple irritations ever so politely in Songs Of Freedom.
Miles Jupp's Songs Of Freedom tour visits Leeds City Varieties on February 7, 7.30pm, and York Barbican on February 22, 8pm. Box office: Leeds, 0113 243 0808 or cityvarieties.co.uk; York, 0844 854 2757 or yorkbarbican.co.uk
Six of the best comedy gigs at York Barbican in 2017
Ricky Gervais
1. Ricky Gervais in Humanity, February 28 and March 1. First stand-up tour in seven years; first night sold out in five minutes, second night immediately added and followed suit.
2. Stewart Lee in Content Provider, May 17. After four years of writing and performing his cult TV show, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, Content Provider is his first full-length show since the award-winning Carpet Remnant World.
3. Count Arthur Strong in The Sound Of Mucus, May 19. Cult comedian Strong uses stories and other things that are hush-hush to pay tribute to one of the best musicals he can remember. He will be "uniquely recreating the salient and poignant moments for your enjoyment. Plus something else".
Milton Jones
4. Milton Jones in Milton Jones Is Out There, September 30. Loud shirts, quiet demeanour, absurdist one-liners as Jones holds up the mirror of truth to society, and sees right through it, which means it's probably just a window.
5. Greg Davies in You Magnificent Beast, November 1 and 2. Very, very tall indeed Cuckoo, Man Down, The Inbetweeners and Taskmaster TV star returns to stand-up for first tour in four years.
6. Jon Richardson in Jon Richardson – The Old Man, November 17. Old Man Richardson, aged only 34, will be complaining about the state of the world but offering no solutions. Fatherhood, Brexit and Trump's triumph leave him asking one question: why can no-one else alive correctly load a dishwasher?
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