Radio Times review

Miles Jupp's amuse-bouche of a comedy about cookery writer Damien Tench is the lightest of farces. This episode revolves around the struggles of Damien's partner Anthony to keep the pernickety Tench out of the kitchen so he can prepare him a Valentine's Day meal in peace. Damien has a reason to stay away as he has to, in scenes reminiscent of W1A, finish the script for his Sky Arts series Poets and Their Palates.

Anyone who's ever read a food column will chortle over Damien's affected culinary musings, but his trip to a builder's merchant with his no-nonsense builder Mr Mullaney (Brendan Dempsey) is a special delight of awkwardness.

In and Out of the Kitchen transfers from Radio 4 not wholly successfully, but there's ample time enough yet and Miles Jupp is amply talented enough to make it very funny indeed. The conceit - a mildly pompous cookery writer, puttering with amiably passive aggression between boyfriend, agent and deadlines - works well enough but, seen in real-time rather than radio-imagined, it is just so relentlessly London middle-class as to be both its main point and chief drawback. The recipe asides work wonderfully well: the agent's predictable Salman Rushdie phone-gags work as well as avocado cheesecake.

In and Out of the Kitchen is another scion from radio that was pleasing to ear and eye without ever being particularly funny. It owed a debt to The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester's exquisite first novel about a pompous gourmand. Damian Trench is not (yet) a mass murderer like Lanchester's Tarquin Minot, but he is another florid stylist who takes his grub seriously. You sense his creator, Miles Jupp, takes comedy seriously too, as this was as carefully assembled and composed as the most exacting recipe from Le Gavroche. Occasionally Trench spoke directly to camera, occasionally there were some (rather beautifully filmed) recipe sequences, but this was capable modern sitcom, capably presented.

Trench was a snob. Almost every great comic creation is, because the gap between the snob's view of themselves and how they're viewed by others is full of comic possibilities. Unfortunately Trench's snobbery, in episode one, was particular - he couldn't abide posh restaurants or fad diets and he refused to moderate his copy for a new column in "Waitsbury's" magazine. I suspect this makes him a snob to whom few can relate, and that In and Out of the Kitchen will remain a niche pursuit. Any sitcom reliant on a running gag about Salman Rushdie has probably found its natural berth on BBC Four.

In and Out of the Kitchen (***), created and written by Miles Jupp, was first heard on Radio 4, a delightful spoof of celebrity chefs and our modern obsessions with food and having the perfect kitchen. Now Jupp and director Mandie Fletcher have brought it to television.

Jupp plays Damien Trench, a food writer obsessed with good nosh, who lives with his partner, Anthony (Justin Edwards), an ex-banker now looking for a job. They're chalk and cheese; Damien has a range of sharp shirts and woolly cardigans, while Anthony spends most of his time loafing around the house in his pants or pyjamas. For him food is merely a fuel, not something to be described in loving detail before every mouthful is savoured; last night Anthony was making a foul-smelling courgette soup as part of his fad diet.

The voiceover of the radio show is maintained here, with Damien doing straight-to-camera pieces as he describes a few days in what he thinks is a busy life but in fact is not; last night's biggest task was baking a simple birthday cake while avoiding his scary agent Iain (Philip Fox), who had the episode's best joke - a wonderful payoff to a running gag about "Salman Rushdie".

It's a life in which nothing ever quite works out to plan, except his delicious recipes, which are given in each programme. (Last night is was crab bisque and Victoria sponge.) The laconic Irish builder, Mr Mullaney (Brendan Dempsey), meanwhile, is working on a succession of jobs in the house with his young assistant Steven (Ade Oyefeso), while Damien's new magazine column for Waitsbury's lands him in legal difficulties. It's lo-fi comedy in which fart gags are set up but not delivered, as it were.

Part of the pleasure of listening to a radio show is in conjuring up the world described (including the never-ending building work and the awful restaurants Iain insists on taking Damien to); here we have it all done for us and I'm not sure it adds to the comedy, and it jars that Damien and Anthony's relationship seems rather tetchier here. But In and Out of the Kitchen is enjoyable enough - and the recipes are cracking.

His partner Anthony's courgette soup diet is upsetting the builders; rival cookery writer Trudie Wilson ("the tautly skinned presenter of Crap Yourself Younger") is threatening to sue over a Waitsbury's magazine column; and his agent insists on taking him to restaurants with names like Zeitgeist. Miles Jupp's radio sitcom, focusing on the eternally pained Damien Trench, makes the jump to TV with nary a hiccup, while retaining those useful fourth-wall-breaking recipes, such as roasted red pepper and crab bisque. A delight.

Radio Times review

Miles Jupp's comedy In and Out of the Kitchen is an occasional pleasure on Radio 4, where it works perfectly; it's a small, quiet, irresistibly intimate bourgeois sitcom centred on writer/creator Jupp's precious food writer Damien Trench and his easy-going boyfriend Anthony (Justin Edwards).

The translation to television in this brief (three-episode) series isn't particularly comfortable, maybe because the alchemy of some shows just works better on radio.

But never mind, it's always a pleasure to meet Trench, a self-absorbed foodie snob who's appalled by supermarkets, trendy restaurants and overly familiar waiters. As we join the Trench household, Damien is agonising about baking a cake for his builders and re-adjusting his principles to write a column for a "Waitburys" magazine. "I write it, they print it, no funny business," he instructs his agent.

Radio Times review

Reader, I LOL-ed. This is brilliant. For the third and final part of Jon Canter's blisteringly funny sitcom, time-travelling biographer James Boswell (Miles Jupp) meets Harold Pinter.

Harry Enfield is spot-on as the master of comic menace. There are a couple of obvious gags ("Would The Caretaker be different without the pauses?" "It would be... shorter.") but Canter writes with originality and depth.

Bizarrely, this would make an excellent introduction to Pinter's work. It's almost -- though it pains me to say it -- edutainment. Essential listening.

Radio Times review

Comedy writer Jon Canter's last radio hit was the engagingly barmy Believe It!, which invented a fantasy life for Richard Wilson of all people. In Canter's new series Dr Johnson's biographer Boswell (Miles Jupp) interviews historical figures (Sigmund Freud last week, Maria Callas today, Harold Pinter coming up).

It's reminiscent of the Sky Arts 1 series Psychobitches in which Rebecca Front did the same sort of thing. I preferred it because its sketch format didn't outstay its welcome. Here the material is stretched thinly over half an hour. But radio editor Jane Anderson thinks it's "a work of genius". You decide.

Radio Times review

What an absolute delight for the brain and the ears. This new series was created by Jon Canter (the freelance comedy writer who has worked with everyone from Fry and Laurie to Smith and Jones), stars the ludicrously vocally talented Miles Jupp, and tantalises the listeners with three impossible interviews.

Each week, James Boswell, the famous biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, travels through time to interview a historical figure he could never have met. This week it's Sigmund Freud, next up is Maria Callas and the series closes with Harold Pinter (played by Harry Enfield).

One cannot help feel pity for Boswell as every question, every response, every word he utters is immediately pounced upon and psychoanalysed by Freud (played to neurotic perfection by Henry Goodman). So much so that Boswell ends the interview believing he may well want to kill his father and sleep with his mother.

A work of genius.

The best radio show of 2014. Miles Jupp's comedy about a food writer is, by far, radio's tastiest dish.