From performance poet and musician to stand-up comedian and stage musical star, Phill Jupitus' career has been nothing if not varied. Following appearances in the likes of Hairspray, The Producers and Spamalot, his latest theatre venture sees him take on the double role of Lord Scrumptious and Baron Bomburst in a UK tour of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - a far cry from his Never Mind The Buzzcocks days. We caught up with him to find out more about the show - and how he was enjoying the rather fancy titles that come with it.

“Well, I've been a king in Spamalot and a sort of oligarch in Urinetown, so I'm doing all of the major 'evil ruler' roles,” says Phill. “Lord Scrumptious is kind of Alan Sugar in a top hat. Obviously the Baron's a much bigger part. He's quite childish, because his wife hates kids so he gets to be the child in her life. It's a laugh.”
For Jupitus, Baron Bomburst is in many ways a very 21st century chap, with his Peter Pan complex, bespoke commissions from a personal toymaker, and general accumulation of stuff.
“We live in an age where people can pursue hobbies and interests using the internet, and men are able to delay the end of childhood for a lot longer. I'm looking right in front of me now, and I've got a 3ft-high, pewter statue of Darth Vader, and then, over my fireplace, there's a similar statue of Boba Fett. Now what kind of adult has that kind of nonsense in their life? But it's just the nature of modern culture, isn't it? I can't remember who it was who said you have to leave childish things behind, but there was a time when once you got your job and became a grown-up, you threw all your toys out. Nowadays, people don't do that, partly because they can sell them on eBay. And then, of course, the longer they keep them, the greater their value is, so people never end up selling the stuff anyway. In the end, people just die and leave a box full of crap for their families to deal with.”
The ‘childish things’ paraphrase is Biblical, in case you're wondering - (1 Corinthians 13:11) “when I became a man, I put away childish things” - and today, attitudes have changed so much that the idea of growing out of things seems almost as distant as the quote itself. Aside from “more Star Wars crap”, I wondered what, given the same opportunities as Baron Bomburst, Jupitus might commission his own toymaker to create.
“What were my favourites when I was a kid?” he ponders. “I tell you what I used to have that was a favourite - the Dinky Thunderbird 2, which had a little Thunderbird 4 in the pod. Now that probably means nothing to you, but I think some of your readers have just burst into tears.”
Funnily enough, Jupitus came across another Dinky toy recently - sourced online, of course, as if to prove his point about the internet.
“I was with a couple of the lads in the cast, and they'd got the 1968 Dinky Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that they'd bought off eBay. They were showing me this little model of the car and the little people that sit in it, and I went, 'Yeah, I know it'. And I hit a lever to release the wings, and they were amazed. They'd had that car for six months without realising it had wings.”
Based on the few hints he drops about it, it sounds like the Chitty in the show is quite a spectacle to behold - but you'll have to wait until you see it if you want to know more.
“I don't want to spoil any surprises, but they've come up with a really new way of doing the flying car thing, which looks amazing. When you see it, you'll be overwhelmed - I know I was, anyway. Computers play a part in it, let's put it that way. But the car's beautiful, absolutely beautiful.”
For the baron who has almost everything, Chitty is something shiny and new and near impossible to resist. Even if he wasn't already spoilt, it'd be hard to blame Bomburst for wanting a piece of the fun: after all, who wouldn't love a flying car? Of all the places you might take it, though, Jupitus' first choice is rather a sweet one: “I'd fly to America, to see my daughter who lives out there.”
Quite the family man, his main pre-Chitty experience of performing to a family audience consists of taking part in his daughter’s school play.
“Just after I was in Hairspray, the drama teacher asked if I would play Mr Bumble in the school production of Oliver!, so I ended up in a school play when I was 48.”
What was that about not growing up? But then, musicals aren't exactly a line of work he sought out for himself. Jupitus' first stage musical part came through an approach by a pair of casting directors who happened to be Never Mind The Buzzcocks fans.
“There were two very nice gentlemen called David Grindrod and James Orange who invited me to come and chat to them in their office, where they said that they thought I could be in musicals. And I said, 'What on earth are you basing that on?' And they said, 'Well, we've seen the intros round on Buzzcocks, and we know that you can hold a tune.' So that’s why I will always have to be eternally grateful to the much-lamented Never Mind The Buzzcocks, because it got me into musicals!”
A long-term, carefully followed career plan is probably not something you could accuse Jupitus of ever having. After beginning his working life as a civil servant, by his own reckoning, he “drifted into performing”, initially as a spoken-word poet.
“I like the way that it's all been a kind of happy accident, all of the jobs that I've got. I'm very content with that way of working.” 
These days, there are few areas of showbiz left that he's yet to try his hand at, but given the chance, he'd still like to do more music. “I'd like to try being a singer-songwriter or to play very noisy guitar in a rock band. I was in the Idiot Bastard Band with Ade Edmondson and Neil Innes and Rowland Rivron, and I've also sung with The Blockheads and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on tour, but I never did it fully on my own.”
Also still on the to-do list is to actually sit down and watch the movie version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - something that he's somehow so far managed to avoid doing.
“I knew a couple of the songs and I knew it was about a flying car, but I hadn't seen it until December, when I came to see this production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Once I got cast in it, it was a deliberate decision not to watch it. I've decided that I'll watch the film as a bit of an ‘end of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ treat.”
Of course, with Jupitus and a number of his co-stars set to leave the tour at the end of April, there'll also be an opportunity to come back and see how the new guys interpret the roles.
“That's part of the fun of it really, going to see all your mates who you've been working with. When I was in The Producers, I went back to see Ross Noble, who was playing the part I'd been doing. It's interesting because the working, backstage version of a show and the one that an audience gets to watch are so wildly different -when you're in the show, you never really know what it looks like.”

by Heather Kincaid