Life for Miles Jupp was definitely going well, very well you might say. Since his last show had finished at the London Palladium, bar the hiatus to the entertainment industry that was Covid he had been a busy man. He has played Emperor Francis I in Ridley Scott’s new film Napoleon, a man who loses a battle, and consequently rather a lot of territory, in spectacular fashion. He’s been in The Full Monty on Disney Plus, The Durrells and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? on ITV, as well as a heap of episodes of Frankie Boyle’s New World Order and Have I Got News For You. He’s made an award-winning radio series and he’s published a novel.
But life, contrary to popular belief does not only hiy you when you are down, it can also catch you out when you think things are going smoothly. One sunny day in the middle of all this, he suddenly suffered a brain seizure. This led to the discovery of a tumour the size of a cherry tomato, and a rather pressing need to undergo major neurosurgery. This is the subject of On I Bang – finding the funny side to a tale of surprise, fear, luck, love and qualified medical practitioners.
As Miles eloquently describes it “This is the show. It’s a story told in a stand-up style. I promise you there are lots of jokes. It’s not me moaning about unsatisfactory customer experience or something I’ve noticed about luggage. Hopefully it’s a pure piece of storytelling, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I got a letter from a guy who saw a work in progress gig and he’s been through the same thing. He was saying people around him were worried but it was very cathartic for him.”
It was quite worrying for Miles and the people around him when it happened as well – but #spoilera;lert – he survived! “I was filming the ITV series Trigger Point. I’d just finished my scene. Ludicrously my character, a radio host, is speaking and then a bomb goes off roughly when it felt like a bomb had gone off in my own head. Luckily I was in a work environment which meant there was a medic on the set so they wrestled me into the appropriate position. It was only a day’s work, but taking that job might have saved my life.”
“The swelling of the tumour causes the pressure. And it’s the pressure that eventually caused the seizure. It could have happened at any time, but until about five minutes before, there was nothing. I just started feeling very dizzy very quickly and there was some flashing of lights. I remember falling forward and then some people holding me down and then it’s just like a series of moments of consciousness. Next time I was in an ambulance
and then I was in A&E at West Middlesex Hospital.“
Through the hilarity, hopefully Miles can help people whose relatives are face with what his was, as he added “I could be lying in a hospital bed plugged into stuff and actually feeling fine, whereas from their point of view it’s ‘oh no, he’s lying in a hospital bed with lots of stuff plugged into him.’ And they got the call from the programme’s line producer to say I was on my way to hospital. So that’s quite as a shocking thing to get when you are on the bus. The luxury for me was you go, ‘well, all I can do is trust these people.’ In a way it’s sort of
freeing. It’s all the unknowns that are stressful.”
Though he appears across the entertainment world, performing stand-up is his main love, as he said on the run up to the tour. “I like walking out onto a stage somewhere. I think the best view of a theatre is nearly always from the stage. I find there’s a sort of romance about touring. I remember with my show Fibber in the Heat appearing in Swindon on a Monday night. I turned up and there was 170 people there. I don’t know Swindon, I didn’t know anyone in Swindon. And I remember thinking, that’s great that 170 people have come here to watch this thing. I just love touring for that. So I really look forward to walking onstage again and telling a story. And hopefully, you know, we’ll have fun.”
If you’d like to have fun one evening listening to how Miles survived this medical emergency and lives to tell the tale. Full details of where he will be telling the tale on tour and where you can by the tickets from can be found at https://www.milesjupp.co.uk/
