Miranda Hart

by Sophie Johnson

  Theatre Guide London praised Miranda’s performance and understanding of human despair: ‘Like Joyce Grenfell, Hart walks such a knife-edge between comedy and drama that at times you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But laugh all the way through the audience does.’ Its impressed reviewer Nick Awde continued: ‘I’ve rarely witnessed such a brilliantly pulled-off piece as this, one that touches every soul in the audience (and manages to get most of them onstage by the end).’ Three Weeks echoed this opinion, urging potential audience members not to miss out: ‘Hilarious… delirious fun, go!’

  Once again, despite such acclaim for House Party, Miranda still lost out when it came to the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Laura Solon, who by coincidence had also attended Downe House school some years after Hart, took home the main award. But at least House Party would eventually transfer to radio – in early 2008, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a four-part adaptation in its high-profile 6.30pm evening comedy slot. This came about when Abigail Wilson, a producer for French and Saunders, saw Hart’s 2003 show, and suggested she pitch to the BBC. After working on the format and making such improvements that gave her critical acclaim, she did a readthrough of her script for BBC executives. Miranda remembers the pitch: ‘People were crying with laughter at her crying with laughter. You could see commissioners thinking, Well, she’s laughing. So we got lucky.’

  So Edinburgh delivered Miranda her dream. It may have been 11 years after her debut trip but, in Miranda Hart’s House Party, she had a hit. Despite the hard work, once she learned to take the pressure off, she enjoyed it: ‘I’ve learned that a show is just a show, not life threatening or a world changer, and, as long as you don’t really care out of proportion about it, then Edinburgh is brilliant and I love it.’

  Now, her first commission had arrived and Miranda had the chance to take her character to a bigger audience via a new medium – the radio.

  6

  RADIO DAYS

  ‘Doctor Radio has fully kicked in.’

  – Miranda on BBC Radio 2 with Jon Holmes

  Many of today’s modern comedians made their way to television via the radio. It is often seen as a testing ground for talent before it is transferred to the small screen. The BBC is particularly considered the master of nurturing talent on the airwaves. Shows that started out on BBC Radio include Hancock’s Half Hour (which made the leap to television as long ago as 1956), Alan Partridge in Knowing Me Knowing You, Goodness Gracious Me, The Mighty Boosh, Mitchell and Webb, The League of Gentlemen, Flight of the Conchords, People Like Us, Dead Ringers, Little Britain and, of course, Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop.

  Radio is also a fantastic way for budding comedy writers to get their break through shows that are open to submissions. Most notably, there was the long-running satirical series Week Ending, broadcast on Friday evenings on BBC Radio 4, between 1970 and 1998. It welcomed material via post, fax or email, and held open writers’ meetings, making it a great entry point for budding writers and comedians. Among the now-familiar names who wrote for the show during its run were Andy Hamilton, David Renwick, David Baddiel and Rob Newman, Andy Riley, Kevin Cecil, Richard Herring, Stewart Lee, Harry Hill, Al Murray, John O’Farrell and Peter Baynham. Between them, they gave us Old Harry’s Game, Outnumbered, One Foot in the Grave, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, The 99p Challenge, Hyperdrive, On the Hour, Fist of Fun, Time Gentlemen Please, Jerry Springer – The Opera, Harry Hill’s TV Burp and the film of Borat. Its many producers, who included John Lloyd, Griff Rhys Jones, the late Geoffrey Perkins and Armando Iannucci, would also nurture numerous writers when they later worked in TV on programmes such as Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, The Day Today and Friday Night Armistice.

  Another radio hit with many writer submissions was BBC Radio 2’s The News Huddlines, a topical show with a studio audience, and with a regular cast of Roy Hudd, June Whitfield and Chris Emmett. It ran from 1975 to 2001, and in doing so outlived Week Ending, with whom it shared many contributors (including Hamilton and Renwick). It also gave early work to Paul Kerensa, who would later work on one-liners for Not Going Out and Miranda.

  More recently, James Cary devised Recording for Training Purposes, where new and experienced writers submitted material, an experiment which unearthed so much fresh talent that established contributors were taking a back seat by its second and third series. Now BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly BBC7) has Newsjack, hosted by Miles Jupp and supported by a regular cast of Lewis MacLeod, Margaret Cabourn-Smith and Kerry Howard. These sorts of opportunities are exclusive to radio and mean that talented writers and performers can improve and grow, rather than being thrown straight to television and lambasted by critics.

  Writers have affection for radio because of its intimacy. James Cary says, ‘If TV is like being yelled at, radio is like a pleasant side-by-side conversation. It’s more like reading a novel, where the pictures are in your head – where the special effects are so much better, and far more memorable.’ There is also far less red tape, and it’s usually a team of far fewer people: the writer, the producer and a broadcast assistant. The live audience give that same instant gratification for performers and script feedback for writers that are associated with television studio sitcoms, as Miranda would discover as she honed her sitcom on BBC Radio 2.

  But Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop wasn’t the comedian’s first foray into the world of radio comedy. One of Miranda’s first acting jobs was in BBC Radio 4’s At Home with the Snails, a bizarre comedy written by and starring Gerard Foster in the lead role of Alex. The show, which ran for two series in 2001–02, follows the post-uni life of Alex, whose unhealthy obsession with snails helps alleviate his depressive disposition. He individually names them, usually after celebrities (there’s a Janet Street-Porter, a Paul Daniels and his favourite, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen).

  Alex’s father, played by Geoffrey Palmer, is delighted at the situation, using his son as a source of material for the book he is writing. Miranda plays Alex’s sister Rose, who lives away from the parental home and runs her own sweet shop. She is greedy for money and has a strange condition. Her heart is quite literally in the wrong place, right up under her armpit – an unusual affliction which means she could die at any moment. Wikipedia succinctly sums up the show’s unique appeal: ‘The humour is politely and subliminally obscene.’ Years after its making and broadcast, Miranda was pleasantly surprised to be reminded on Twitter about the series, responding to @SaliWho: ‘I had forgotten all about Home with the Snails. Geoffrey Palmer and Angela Thorne as your parents as a first job pretty cool.’

  Between Edinburgh runs and appearances on the comedy circuit, while holding down office temp work, Miranda found more radio offers trickling in after At Home with the Snails. In October 2002, she appeared on BBC Radio 4’s long-running panel game Quote… Unquote alongside chairman Nigel Rees and fellow guests Louise Doughty, Christopher Brookmyre and Chris Neill. By 2004, she was in with the cool kids, on The 99p Challenge, which was well liked and renowned for having only the best guests – there was no filler here. Hosted every week by Sue Perkins, Miranda was billed alongside Armando Iannucci, Marcus Brigstocke and Nick Frost. Other regular contributors to the show were Simon Pegg, Peter Serafinowicz, Peter Baynham, Bill Bailey, Rob Rouse and David Quantick. Even the writing credits were high calibre: Kevin Cecil, Andy Riley and Jon Holmes supplied the script. She later rejoined Iannucci for the last episode of Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive’s fourth series in September 2008, where Quantick and Chris Addison were her fellow panellists. Meanwhile, in 2005, David Tyler, the producer of both Charm Offensive and The 99p Challenge, had also cast her in a guest part for Marcus Brigstocke’s sitcom, Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off.

  Hart’s first self-penned work for radio came in 2006 with The Hills are Alive, a 15-minute character monologue broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of its ‘Inner Voices’ strand. There were five episodes in total; the other comedians in the series were Julia Morris, Pauline McLynn, Laura Solon and Joanna Neary. Miranda’s younger siste
r Alice co-wrote the piece inspired by the comedian’s agoraphobic phase.

  But it was the radio adaptation of her 2005 Edinburgh show which firmly established Miranda in her own right. Miranda Hart’s House Party began on Radio 4 on Tuesday, 1 January 2008. The BBC’s blurb for the show revealed a new supporting cast: ‘Miranda Hart serves up a cocktail of standup, sketches, song and dance, aided and abetted by Sharon Horgan, Kim Wall and special guests.’ While Miranda wrote the show herself, she did have some assistance from additional writers John Finnemore and Tony Roche, as well as members of the cast.

  The first episode was transferred almost directly from the stage show, where she tries too hard to be the best host she possibly can. Across the four episodes, though, Miranda explores new ways to entertain her friends. She holds a pre-clubbing party, desperate to claw back her youth; she gets bored with her flat, so decides to take her friends out for a picnic; and she tries to impress with a celebrity guest.

  Prior to House Party’s run, in May 2007, the pilot of Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop had kicked off a series of half-hour comedy pilots for BBC Radio 2. Some of the characters were played by different actors to the subsequent full series: Stevie was played by Morwenna Banks and Penny (Miranda’s mother) was played by Alison Steadman, while Katy Brand, Jim Howick, Charlotte McDougall and Vincenzo Pellegrino took supporting roles.

  Miranda told the BBC’s Writersroom of the changes within the show during the writing process: ‘There were initially three people who worked in the shop. One woman was incredibly nervous, screamed a lot… And there were three boarding-school friends and now there are only two. Small changes.’

  One listener, enjoying a repeat on BBC7 in March 2010, was confused by the differences, not realising it was the pilot that was being broadcast. On Digital Spy, a user called Check_it posted on the forum: ‘Hi, has anyone noticed that they’re running this on BBC 7, and saying that it’s the original, but it’s been completely re-recorded with most of the actors replaced, with no mention of it. Does anyone know why they’ve done this?! … Oh and Gary isn’t a chef anymore, he’s a travel agent!!! It’s really bizarre!!!’ You’ll be pleased to hear that Check_it was put out of his or her misery and the situation was explained.

  Joke Shop was commissioned for a four-part series, beginning in August 2008. Patricia Hodge took over as Mum, Sarah Hadland was cast as Stevie and Tom Ellis became Gary. The stories are very similar to those in the subsequent TV series.

  Episode one, ‘What A Flirt’, sees Gary back from his travels in Malaysia. Miranda runs into him, discovering that he is the chef at the restaurant next door to her joke shop. She makes a fool of herself, telling him that she’s an Olympic gymnast and pretending to have trapped wind. When he asks her out for a drink, she goes clothes shopping in an effort to impress. Finding nothing at Big and Long, she chooses an outfit from another store and returns to the shop to show it off to Stevie, who exclaims, ‘Miranda! Why are you dressed as a transvestite?’ While at dinner, Miranda and Gary discuss how they are not interested in having children, despite their mothers’ pleas for marriage and kids. Things are going well, and Gary follows Miranda up to her flat. When they switch on the light, though, they discover masses of baby clothes and toys strewn on the floor – Stevie’s revenge. The next day, Miranda tries to convince Gary it was a mix-up, and all is well again. But then, he spots her with her old school chums, trying on wedding dresses and runs away. She chases after him while screaming, ‘I’m not desperate.’

  This sounds very similar to the plot of the TV series’ very first episode, although there are key differences. The script was, in fact, initially written for television, but, when Miranda was offered a radio show instead, she had to find some workarounds. Of course, the look to camera wasn’t possible on radio, so Miranda tried a different approach: ‘What we did do on the radio was occasionally whisper to the listener which didn’t really work. It’s a perfect example of why radio’s so much harder to write – I’ve got to write a joke there because I can’t look to camera.’

  James Cary, a writer on the show, backs this up, talking about the importance of the script in radio comedy. ‘There’s no hiding in radio – and so, as a radio sitcom writer, you learn fast. If the show misfires, it’s unlikely to have been a technical fault. Most likely, it’s a script error, a string of duff jokes, a confusing plot turn or a badly defined character, i.e. your fault.’

  Another of radio’s restrictions on Miranda’s style was the slapstick element of the show. Speaking on Loose Women, she said, ‘It was quite hard doing the falling over on the radio. There was a lot of “Oh! Mind those boxes, Miranda…” “Oh! Ohhhh nooo!” BANG! Sort of doesn’t sound very good.’

  Episode two of Joke Shop sees Miranda trying to prove she can get a real job, but ends up singing ‘The Greatest Love of All’ to her interviewers, claiming, ‘I didn’t realise I knew so many verses.’ In the television version, one prospective employer quips back, ‘I didn’t know there were so many,’ but this must have been added in Miranda’s rewrite or by one of her gag writers, as it isn’t in the radio show. Instead, the scene finishes with a joke that could only work on radio. She asks him if he thinks she would look sexy in a power suit and he replies dryly, ‘Anything’s better than the pirate outfit.’

  ‘What A Wife’, the third episode, is the most radio-friendly of the four. While some jokes and the idea of Miranda being Gary’s safety wife made it through to the TV series, the main storyline would not feature. When an entrepreneur goes into Gary’s restaurant, he assumes that it is a family business and he lies that it is. So when he hosts a charity gala event, Gary needs to take a fake wife with him. Controversially, he asks Stevie instead of Miranda.

  The final episode of the radio series is ‘What An Excuse’, in which Miranda desperately tries to find a reason not to attend her mother’s Pride and Prejudice-themed party, which Penny says will be ‘totally thrillybots’. In the end, she resorts to saying she’s a lesbian just to get out of being set up at the party. Interestingly, in this episode, Stevie refers to her boyfriend Phil who was scrapped for the television series, allowing for more competition and bickering when Miranda is trying to impress men. On her BBC blog for series one of the TV version, Miranda talked about rewriting this episode for television: ‘It was very useful having written episodes for the radio before writing the TV [series] – but I used a lot less from them than I thought I would, as in a way, it is better to start from scratch… I became stuck on material from the radio that had worked in front of the live audience, and tried to force it in to a story. That is often harder than starting a draft from scratch.’

  The radio show got a decent reception. Martin Hoyle of the Financial Times wrote: ‘Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop is likeably silly, the maladroit heroine engagingly self-destructing.’

  In the spring of 2009, it was even nominated for the prestigious Sony Radio Academy Award for Comedy but Count Arthur Strong’s Radio 4 sitcom, written by and starring Steve Delaney, took the accolade. Hart was gracious in defeat, posting on Twitter: ‘Back from Sony awards. Count Arthur won – yay! Although firmly believe awards are bollocks. And yes would say that even if I had won.’

  Writing in The Times, Chris Campling stated that ‘Miranda Hart is shaping up as the Big Lady of the future’, and argued that ‘Hart’s new sitcom (so much a trailer for a TV version that they are already filming the TV version) trades on her not only being big, but very tall and extremely posh.’ Indeed, a pilot of Miranda had been made for television while Joke Shop was still being broadcast on Radio 2, but BBC executives were so sure of the show that they commissioned a full series.

  Before the TV series started and her popularity rocketed, Miranda was known for the sitcoms Hyperdrive and Not Going Out, and so appeared on radio panel shows as a relative unknown. But her wit and likeable persona made her the perfect guest and, in April 2009, she appeared on The Unbelievable Truth, hosted by David Mitchell. Her fellow guests were veteran panel-show performers Art
hur Smith, Sue Perkins and Sean Lock. She had to sneak truths past the others about cricket, but the team managed to spot most of the facts among her nonsense, including the following: ‘Cricket took place between England and Australia in a series of so-called pest matches. The winners were traditionally awarded the Ashers – Jane and her brother Peter. Jane has catered for cricket teas since its invention, but was sacked in the 80s when Ian Botham became too fat to run.’

  She only managed to smuggle one truth in, which is that Prince Philip sometimes hides a radio in his top hat when he goes to the Ascot races, because he likes listening to the cricket. She ended up in third place with minus one point.

  Her next big radio gig came in March 2011, at the peak of Miranda hype. Fresh from awards season, she returned to BBC Radio 2 for three nights presenting with Jon Holmes. Jon usually hosts the Saturday afternoon ‘drive time’ show on BBC 6 Music, and has described it as being broadcast ‘on a day when no one’s driving home from work on a digital radio station that you can’t get in your car’. Previously, he had worked for commercial stations XFM and Virgin Radio, but parted company from both after various stunts and pranks. Virgin received a record taste and decency fine of £75,000 for Holmes’s feature ‘Swearing Radio Hangman for the Under-12s’.