Phill Jupitus

Phill Jupitus
File:Phill jupitus.JPG Phill Jupitus in Edinburgh 2006
Born	(1962-06-25) 25 June 1962 Newport, Isle of Wight
Occupation	Broadcaster
Children	2

Phill Jupitus (born 25 June 1962) is an English broadcaster.

He is a regular on television and radio panel shows, including BBC Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and BBC Two/BBC Four's QI, and is a team captain on BBC Two's Never Mind The Buzzcocks. He was also a team captain on the BBC's television comedy panel show It's Only TV But I Like It in 1999.

Jupitus is also a disc jockey, both on the radio and at clubs and festivals, a fan of alternative music styles. He presented the weekday breakfast show on digital radio station BBC 6 Music but left after five years, in March 2007. In recent years he has presented some of the BBC's television coverage of music events, such as the Glastonbury Festival.

Early life

Born in Newport on the Isle of Wight to Dot and Bob Jupitus (an artist and self-employed surveyor respectively), he is the eldest of three children. His brother Richard was born in 1966 and sister Kate in 1970.

Christened 'Phillip Jupitus', he has said that the shortening of his first name to 'Phill' arose due to his mother's reminders that the name 'Phillip' is spelled with two 'L's, something he carried over to the short form 'Phill'. His paternal grandparents are Lithuanian and claim that 'Jupitus' is an anglicised version of their original surname (supposedly 'Šeputis' [ʃəputis] which sounds somewhat similar to 'Jupitus') and was ascribed to them by an Immigration Officer when they emigrated to Britain from Russia in 1917.

In 1966 the family left the island and moved to Horndon-on-the-Hill in Essex before settling in Leigh-on-Sea. He attended Northbury Infants and Junior schools in Barking and later attended Woolverstone Hall School near Ipswich as a private boarder.

He took eight O-Level exams, failing four, and enrolled at a Technical College briefly to study at A-Level.

After dropping out of college, he became a Civil Servant for the then Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) (now the Department of Work and Pensions) working in a Jobcentre.

Career

During his five years at the DHSS, he began writing political poetry and drawing cartoons in distracted moments. He quit the DHSS in 1984, hopeful of a career move into the music industry.

Using the moniker 'Porky the Poet', he became a performance poet and approached local bands to offer himself as a support act for their tours:

I thought it looked easy, I was very cheap. If you got another band to support you, there are probably four of them and roadies and managers. But me - I just turned up and read poems.

— Phill Jupitus,

Both Mark Lamarr and Sean Hughes, with whom he appeared on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, also started their careers as performance poets. He toured the student scene of colleges, universities and student unions supporting bands such as Billy Bragg, The Style Council and The Housemartins.

He supported Billy Bragg once more on the Labour Party sponsored Red Wedge tour in 1985: "In the early 80s, I got involved with Red Wedge, in which Neil Kinnock got various bands to stage concerts for Labour. The reason I got involved was 20% because I believed in the cause, 30% because I loved Billy Bragg, and 50% because I wanted to meet Paul Weller".

After Red Wedge, he found it difficult to get other bookings due to the decline of political poetry as a mainstream art. He joined indie record label "Go! Discs" as a runner, which had signed Billy Bragg and other bands such as The Housemartins.

Bragg has since said: "We ended up managing to get him a job at Go! Discs, which was brilliant. I was concerned that the cut-throat nature of the record business would make him jaded - underneath that rhino exterior there is quite a sensitive person - but that was before I realised that he was going to come back and do gigs again. Working at Go! Discs got his confidence up."

He became press officer and compere for The Housemartins (appearing in the Music Video for "Happy Hour" in 1986), using the compere role to continue being front of an audience, whilst also taking support slots for other artists. During this time he worked as a warm up act on the Channel 4 TV show The Show. He quit working for Go! in 1989 and fell back on his poetry and compering to try and gain a foothold on the London Comedy Circuit.

He conceived and directed the Brit-nominated video for Billy Bragg's track "Sexuality" in 1991 and wrote a parody version about bestiality. He also made an appearance alongside R.E.M. in Bragg's "You Woke Up My Neighbourhood" video and on Searchlight magazine's 2006 "Hope Not Hate" campaign tour with Bragg, singing the parody. He has also appeared numerous times at the Glastonbury Festival acting as DJ and compere in The Left Field tent.

Jupitus also produced the music video for Kirsty MacColl's 1991 single release "All I Ever Wanted" from the album Electric Landlady. He appeared at her Tribute Concert in 2002 as compere and also sang "Fifteen Minutes" one of her songs.

He began hosting his own show on BBC GLR in 1995, a regular job that would last until 2000. After which he embarked on his first Stand-Up Tour of the UK Jedi, Steady, Go, performing the Star Wars story in a "comedic "fashion.

Phil will be performing at the Reading and Leeds festivals in 2008.

Jupitus is regarded as one of the media figures who, in the 90's,cultivated and popularised the public image of the "mockney."

Television

Jupitus' big television break came in 1996 when he joined BBC Two's pop quiz Never Mind The Buzzcocks as a regular team captain. He also frequently appears on QI as a guest panellist; during the Vodcast for one 2007 episode, he showed off an impressive Dalek impersonation and also has a history of doing impersonations of QI host Stephen Fry while on the show.

His second UK Tour 'Quadrophobia' in 1999 was released on VHS and later DVD.

He was the Breakfast DJ on BBC 6 Music from 2002 until 2007-03-30. The last song played, by listener request, was "Broadway", by The Clash, but has made brief returns to the station during the summer of 2007, sitting in for Stephen Merchant on Sunday afternoon & Liz Kershaw on Saturday mornings.

Other works

Away from his comedy and DJ work, Jupitus has also worked on Radio 4 as a regular contributor to Loose Ends, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, presented 'Best Sellers' - a series on the life and work of Peter Sellers - and wrote and presented 'Disneyfied', a documentary on the work of Walt Disney.

He has presented several editions of the popular 'Top Ten' series for Channel 4, while also joining another "comedy" panel game - It's Only TV But I Like It - as a team captain, alongside Jonathan Ross and Julian Clary.

He has made one appearance in an Episode of Holby City as a patient (Episode titled 'Men are from Mars' Season 4 Episode 3). As a voice actor he has provided the voices for Dandelion in an ITV adaptation of Watership Down and also performing a selection of voices for Rex the Runt by Aardman Animations.

He appeared as a sports journalist in the movie Mike Bassett: England Manager.

Jupitus made a guest appearance on the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band 40th anniversary DVD performing with the band on the track 'Mr. Apollo' and has toured with them around the UK. He appears on the Bonzos' 2007 album Pour L'Amour Des Chiens.

He will be performing with The Blockheads (and has done so sporadically over the last few years since Ian Dury's death) on their 30th anniversary tour in 2007.

He co-wrote and starred in the play Waiting For Alice with Andre Vincent which had a run at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The world-premier took place on 16 July 2007 at the St. Ives Theatre in Cornwall, a regular holiday spot of his for the last 25 years.

He is also a continuity announcer for the UKTV channel Dave during the channel's evening schedule.

Jupitus has also appeared on the Radio 4 show The Unbelievable Truth twice.

Since August 2008 he has become the new host of the Times football podcast "The Game", Replacing the previous co-hosts Gabriele Marcotti and Guillem Balague. Although Marcotti will still be the regular pundit on the show

Personal life

Jupitus was born in Newport on the Isle of Wight. He currently lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Indeed, he has spent his life gradually moving along the A13. He has stated on air that his dying act should be being shot out of a cannon off Shoeburyness, at the eastern end of that road. He is married and has two daughters.

Trivia

• He is arachnophobic.
• He has played guitar live with Billy Bragg, one photo of which is here on kirstymaccoll.com.
• Some sources state his birth name as 'Phillip Swann'.

External links

• BBC 6 Music: Phill Jupitus' breakfast show
• Phill Jupitus at IMDb
• Phill Jupitus' Biography on Chortle
• Phill's MySpace

References

• BBC Radio 4, 2000. In Conversation With... Phill Jupitus. Series 2, Episode 7, first broadcast 18 May.