We have all seen comedians die on stage. Is Miles Jupp’s new show about a comedian dying offstage? “We’ll find out after the interval,” teases the 44-year-old – his audience having probably worked out by now whether the story of his brain seizure has a fatal ending. It was a close call, though. Jupp was filming the ITV drama Trigger Point in 2021 when his vision went haywire and he lost consciousness. The seizure, the result of a benign tumour on his brain, could have happened at any time, doctors told him – the implications of which haunt this father of five, as he recounts the health-scare story in touring show On I Bang.
The title indicates the tone: only someone with our host’s studied charm and very English brand of self-deprecation could present this life-and-death tale as “banging on”. In previous shows, that fastidious gentility has been applied to sometimes inconsequential subject matter. Here, Jupp pairs the courteous style with matters much more substantial, and often indelicate too. OK, so standup about undignified medical procedures is not novel. But in Jupp’s account of rectal self-swabbing, or indeed when he describes living with a catheter as “fabulously decadent”, the clash of decorous language and ignoble reality is still a thing to behold.
