Stand-Up For Your Rights

Thanks to his TV work on shows such as Nevermind The Buzzcocks and QI, Phill Jupitus is a fairly irregular stand-up performer these days, although he does participate much more frequently in improvisational comedy. It’s in this capacity that he and the stars of Whose Line Is It Anyway? will visit Dublin later this month for a brace of performances at the Carlsberg Comedy Festival at the Iveagh Gardens. Jupitus is manifestly excited by the prospect of performing in front of a Dublin crowd again.

“Irish audiences are genuinely excited by improv because they don’t know what’s going to happen,” he enthuses. “There’s a sense of that. When you do it in the UK, there’s a sense of ‘Oh right, they’re going to do that.’ Whereas I really feel with Irish crowds, there’s a kind of tension with improv that you don’t get with stand-up.”
Whose Line Is It Anyway? in its earliest incarnation on Channel 4 was unmissable viewing (and far superior to the rather bland American spin-off), thanks to the contributions of performers such as Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, Mike McShane and Tony Slattery, not to mention the witty jibes from host Clive Anderson. But perhaps the most notable guest was John Sessions (later to star in Stella Street alongside Phil Cornwell – now the voice of Murdoc in Gorillaz), whose performances were invariably brilliant.
“I always thought Sessions was extraordinary,” nods Phill. “People didn’t take to him because they thought he was being clever for its own sake. They had that game where you told a story in the style of an author, and the first person would go ‘The Yellow Pages’, the next person would say, ‘Enid Blyton’ and the third person would go ‘Stephen King’. Then it would come to Sessions and he’d say, ‘Noam Chomsky’. And it’s like, ‘Let it go!’
“But he’s a delight, and if you ever interview him, here’s a skill he’s got – you tell him the name of any classical music composer, and he’ll tell you their date of birth and the date they died. I’ve seen Stephen Fry do it – he’s gone up to him and said, ‘Sibelius’. And John will shout two dates at you!”
Jupitus for my money came up with the funniest ever line on Nevermind The Buzzcocks. Captaining a team which included the unique combination of veteran BBC radio DJ Tony Blackburn (wearing a gaudy jacket covered in glitter) and iconic guitarist Slash (resplendent in trademark top hat) he delivered the quip, “We look like the most inept circus in the world, don’t we?”
“It was a very odd day,” recalls Jupitus. “I remember Tony Blackburn and Slash being in the room, and Slash was telling us all these terrible stories of debauchery from the days of Guns N’ Roses. Bob Fraser-Steele, one of the writers on the show, loves prising stories out of the rock stars, and he goes, ‘Go on Slash, tell us something really great.’ And Slash says, ‘We did a Guns N’ Roses show one night that was so fucking off-the-hook, my hat melted.’ So there was half-an-hour of these anecdotes about cocaine, Jack Daniels, teenage girls, and on and on. And Tony Blackburn’s sat there in his Pringle.
“There was a lull in the conversation where we were all just taking it in, and Tony Blackburn goes (does perfect Blackburn impression), ‘I was in panto with Roger De Courcey, Nookie Bear and Freddie Starr. I have to say that Roger and Freddie didn’t really get on with each other, it was quite tense backstage. Towards the end of the run, Freddie got Nookie Bear one night and shat in it.’ Slash looks at Tony Blackburn and goes, ‘He shat in a bear?’ You could tell that totally fucked with his head. I had to explain that it was a puppet!”
Jupitus says that panel shows in general are an exercise in creative social engineering.
“In the series of QI we just recorded, Ross Noble did an episode,” he explains. “The producer, John Lloyd, said that it’s one of the funniest nights of TV he’s ever seen recorded. Ross and Stephen Fry just worked together brilliantly. You wouldn’t imagine that a kind of bright, ADD kid from the north-east and a Cambridge-educated doctor of letters would work so beautifully, but they did. Again, it’s a bit like improv – when QI works, the ideas really start flying around.”
Funnily enough, before Christmas I interviewed one of the erstwhile captains on Buzzcocks, Sean Hughes, who expressed a pretty dim view of Stephen Fry.
“To be honest, as one of London’s leading misanthropes, I can say that Sean doesn’t like himself,” laughs Jupitus.
Such is Jupitus’ confidence in the performers on QI, he is even willing to appear on the show at very short notice.
“The last one I recorded was purely by accident,” he reflects. “Sean Lock was on tour in the Isle of Man, and he got trapped by the ash cloud. He couldn’t get back the for the show, so Fry phoned me in the afternoon and said, ’Are you in London?’ I said, ’Yeah’ and he asked if I wanted to do QI that night. I went, ’Alright, yeah’ and that’s the only show where I would say yes to appearing on the day, because you’re that confident in the performers and the format.”
Speaking of Mr Lock, he was responsible for one of the great overlooked sitcoms of the noughties, the Beckett/Mike Leigh/Seinfeld mash-up 15 Storeys High.
“I’m so glad they did a second series of it,” says Jupitus of the show. “I’m glad they’re around for people to immerse themselves in. Sean’s got a great comedy mind and an interesting attitude to the job. I was chatting to him the other day and I love talking about comedy with him, cos he’s got a fascinating take on it, which is that comedians are slightly dysfunctional because you’re mining this part of yourself that used to be free range. You’re tapping into your own sense of humour for material, whereas it’s something that just used to fall out of you when you were out with your mates.
“Locky was the first comedian I ever knew who had a proper work ethic – and that changed the way I looked at writing and performing. He’s just one of my favourite comedians.”

Phill Jupitus performs with the stars of Whose Line Is It Anyway? at the Carlsberg Comedy Carnival on July 24 and 25