Miles Jupp on JL Carr, author of A Month in the Country

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

"I find his novels extraordinarily beautiful .. and they're an excellent length."

Miles Jupp picks an author he loves, but knows little about. JL Carr was born in Yorkshire and was a teacher, mapmaker, and an eccentric. Joining the comedian in studio to discuss Carr is a man who knew him well - DJ Taylor - who paints a picture of a man who hated London literary parties and knew how to have fun with anyone sent to interview him. A delightful episode that includes archive of Carr himself, plus Kenneth Branagh reading from his biography, God's Englishman by Byron Rogers.

Carr's novel - A Month in the Country - was shortlisted for the Booker and turned into a film starring Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth and Natasha Richardson in 1987.

The producer for BBC Studios in Bristol is Miles Warde

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:05.6	Your time starts now.
0:07.2	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:09.4	Absolutely right.
0:11.5	So, you might like to know that the BBC makes loads of other podcasts.
0:15.6	Really?
0:16.4	Wow.
0:17.2	Many of them are very funny.
0:19.1	Which I think means...
0:20.3	A hatful of ha-hars. And energy. Even if we do very funny. Which I think means... A hatful of ha haas.
0:21.7	And energy!
0:40.1	Even if we do say so ourselves. I agree 100% of that. Find them all on BBC Sounds. Just tell us a joke. Come on, tell us a joke, tell us a joke, come on tell us a joke. Just search comedy on BBC Sounds. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in. Today's guest is Miles Jupp, actor, comedian, writer,
0:44.8	a man who believed for much of his life that he was descended from Belgian Huguenots,
0:46.6	to which me may return.
0:48.9	But first, whom have you picked Miles and why?
0:52.1	I have selected the novelist J.L. Carr.
1:10.8	Really, because I find his novels extraordinarily beautiful, a friend of mine, we sort of overlap in tastes, and we'd sort of send each other recommendations, and he'd said, you must read a month in the country, and I'd never heard of it, never read it, and then I came across a copy in, hey, not so far from where I live, and I just, I just completely adored it it and I didn't know anything at all about him, the writer.
1:13.2	Yes. The novels, I think, are beautiful and every now and then there'll be a sentence that makes you put your bookmark in and just stop and have a good old think for a while. At the end of a month in the country and he says, you can ask and ask, but you can never have again those things which you once thought you would have forever.
1:27.0	I just think it's remarkable.
1:28.3	Was it a month in the country that turned you on to him then? can ask, but you can never have again those things which you once thought you would have forever. I just think it's remarkable.
1:47.4	Was it a month in the country that turned you on to him then? Yeah, that was the first one. And I've found since, you know, I've read a lot of them. They're an excellent length, his books. A writer and a man. What do you think of him as a man? Genuinely unusual, I suppose. I was quite drawn to many aspects of his from North riding where my own mother is from, and then spent much of his life in Kettering, which
1:51.6	wasn't all that far from where I spent my teenage years. But I think it's extraordinary.
	...

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