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.
The first act, where his story is more specific, and more alarming, is strongest here. By the time he is post-op and out of danger, the stakes are lower and the hospital comedy (“Have you moved your bowels yet, Mr Jupp?”) a bit generic. This is all communicated more through storytelling than standup, meticulously scripted as it measures out Jupp’s journey through seizure, diagnosis and treatment, with cameos from his parents, his father-in-law and a cast of real and drolly imagined brain surgeons.
Jupp is far too English, of course, to dwell on the emotional implications of his story. But the not-dwelling is artfully done, with a running joke about Jupp’s messy family deployed to stand in for all that absent emoting. The lessons drawn from the experience, finally, are the ones you would expect – but Jupp makes an elegant and amusing guide to the brink of death and back again.
