Miranda Hart

by Sophie Johnson

  For conflict and confinement, the writers have to put their character into a situation they can’t escape from. This could be a literal prison (Porridge) or the ties of a father–son relationship (Steptoe and Son). This is where they put the situation into ‘situation comedy’. Miranda is stuck in the joke shop with Stevie, constantly visited by her mother and friends. Gary lives just next door which not only makes it easier to contrive stories, it also means it’s impossible for her to escape her feelings for him. Talking to BBC Writersroom, Miranda says that it took a year and a half to decide that the joke shop was the right place, despite reservations at the time from the Head of Comedy. ‘He was like, “What’s it going to be all about? Fart sweets?”’ recalled Miranda. It was suggested that the show could be set in an office, but Miranda stuck to her guns. Miranda is trapped in a world with her sitcom ‘family’, a dynamic played out through a well-written group of characters. She is at odds with her mother Penny, Tilly, Stevie and even Gary, but ultimately loves them all.

  The family unit is often vital in sitcom, whether or not the characters are biologically related. Writer Graham Linehan has said of the ‘family’ in Father Ted, ‘Sometimes you get lucky, I think. We accidentally created a bunch of characters who really spoke to each other… What we didn’t realise was that these were separate people but, when you saw them together, they looked like a family.’

  And then, hopefully, comedic cracks start to show in those relationships. James Cary says in his sitcom ‘recipe’. ‘After a while, your carefully blended ingredients should rise and then explode into amusing calamitous peaks, up to three times in half an hour, if you’re lucky.’

  This certainly happens in Miranda. It seems it can’t go 10 minutes without the lead character getting caught, sometimes literally, with her pants down. These are the moments in sitcoms that live beyond the context of the show. Cary cites other examples like the ‘chandelier in Only Fools And Horses; vicar and huge puddle in The Vicar of Dibley; Compo in bath on wheels in Last Of The Summer Wine’. Next to these, Miranda falling into an open grave fits neatly into this canon of clip-show fodder. Then there’s the matter of catchphrases, and Miranda has plenty of those as we know: ‘Bear with, bear with…’, ‘…what I call…’ and the very subtitle of this book.

  The last ingredient in the sitcom ‘recipe’ is casting, and, with supporting characters played by the likes of Sally Phillips, Sarah Hadland, Tom Ellis, Patricia Hodge, James Holmes and Tom Conti, there are fantastic performances to support Miranda’s lead role.

  Miranda begins the writing process on paper, firstly in her notepad. Before long, the walls of her kitchen are covered with flipchart paper in order to work out each plot. After that, she writes a scene-by-scene breakdown before sitting down to the first draft. While she knew her characters and was good with jokes and dialogue, Miranda didn’t have much experience with story – something vital to sitcom – and so swotting up was necessary: ‘I read loads of books, did loads of research and I had two people help me – Richard Hurst and James Cary – and I would present them with subject matters or big set pieces that I thought would be funny and vague ideas how that would work with scenes and they would help me structure that into a sitcom story.’

  Miranda isn’t alone here in finding the plotting tough. Award-winning writer Jesse Armstrong, whose credits include Peep Show and The Thick of It, has said, ‘The plotting is by far the hardest bit. It feels like the bit where you need someone else in the room because you get an idea and it’s no good or it’s difficult to get to the next idea unless you’ve got someone else to bounce off.’

  His co-writer on Peep Show, Sam Bain, added, ‘It’s sort of like engineering or building a table, just making sure it all works. It can be quite exhausting.’

  Linking these strands of story and escalating them to a climax is the ultimate goal for sitcom writers and can be seen executed brilliantly in modern sitcoms such as Curb Your Enthusiasm. Every episode sees Larry David caught up in a web of deceit, awkwardness and anger, usually of his own making. Miranda was keen to get this pace into her own sitcom: ‘It took a bit of persuading to have two or three stories going at once – because we’re so used to American sitcoms, which are so fast paced – but I think everyone’s reaction, even the producer, was there’s too much going on here.’ However, because the lead character is in every scene, there isn’t the option to cut away to someone else, then cut back to Miranda in another situation. With a strong foundation in place, there is room for the show to race about chaotically and avoid the relatively pedestrian pace of certain British comedies. Miranda commented, ‘Sometimes I watch six minutes of a British sitcom (naming no names) and I think surely forty minutes have passed, so I wanted to make it as pacey as possible.’

  One way the writers maintained the show’s pace was to imagine the climactic point of a plot, then place it in the middle of the episode, thus forcing themselves to go further still in the final minutes. Miranda could relate here to the writing methods of the man behind Father Ted and The IT Crowd: ‘That’s Graham Linehan’s thing of: think of three set pieces for your characters, what would be a really funny situation for them, then connect them.’ As with Stevie and the Great Dane, the gym montage with Miranda rolling on yoga balls and struggling with the cross trainer was initially conceived as a set piece and the story wove around it. It was meant to be the end of the episode but instead made up its beginning. She compares this sort of momentum to her past experience writing her stand-up act: ‘You’ve got to kill them with the first one and then the last one’s got to be good too. As Ken Dodd says, start good, end brilliant.’

  Once Miranda has written the scene-by-scene breakdown to work from, she begins work on the lonely and arduous task of writing the first draft.

  Writer of Shameless Paul Abbott has said, ‘I think the first draft is always a drudge, and I wish there were elves that could sort of just lay down the canvas and stuff. Well, they can’t. You have to do it and you have to bleed.’

  It can take Miranda as little as five days to squeeze out her first draft out, but rewriting and honing the story to make it as credible and funny as possible can take a further three or four weeks. As a studio audience sitcom, Miranda needs to have as many gags as possible, to encourage the crowd to laugh out loud. Although Miranda’s good at jokes, with so many ‘laugh-out-louds’ required, she enlisted some gag writers to become involved at the end of the process. One writer, Paul Kerensa, had already written for Miranda on Not Going Out and added that same gag-heavy tone which had made that show such a success.

  Being a studio audience show in the 21st century, Miranda may be seen by some as old-fashioned, but, as well as sticking to the traditions of light entertainment, it deconstructs them. Miranda said that, while developing the show with the BBC, she was keen to create something that combined light entertainment with sitcom: ‘A sitcom that can do the Eric Morecambe look to camera, I want to do that.’

  Deconstructing sitcom is tricky to pull off and Miranda and her writers were careful not to overstep the mark. James Cary said, ‘There are one or two lines delivered to camera in the middle of scenes like “This is like a farce”, but these jokes have a law of diminishing returns, and we often write them, feel better and delete them before they get to the readthrough.’ The knowing in-joke can be clever, but threatens to distract from the story and the characters the audience really care about. ‘They have invested emotionally in the world that’s been created,’ said Cary, ‘and they don’t want to see behind the scenery.’

  Interestingly, a similar sort of deconstruction is taking place in another contemporary studio audience sitcom: the BBC’s Mrs Brown’s Boys. It appears on the face of it to be an intensely traditional sitcom, but actually plays with the form. So, when an actor forgets their lines or a piece of set falls down, the blooper is left in. Some shows would shift the outtakes to the credits roll or a DVD extra, but not here. Never mind looks to the camera, the fourth wall is well and truly broken down ther
e.

  So with just the right amount of pratfalls, looks to camera, utterances of ‘Such fun!’ and escalating storylines, the script is ready. After a readthrough with the actors, pre-production starts, and Miranda meets with the crew to describe how she envisions what she has written: ‘Suddenly you find yourself having meetings with costume designers about characters you have written, or the props department about how exactly you saw that “grapefruit you wanted to have befriended”.’

  Finally, an invited audience shows up at the studio to watch the show being recorded. No matter how meticulously the script is gone over to make sure there is a steady stream of jokes, the British public can be unpredictable. ‘You can’t go three minutes with a silent audience,’ Miranda has warned. ‘There were moments I thought that would get something and didn’t, or I thought would be bigger.’ But thankfully an incidental line can also be unexpectedly well received. One of the first lines in the show is where Miranda blames her lateness on the train commute, but, as Stevie points out to her, ‘You live upstairs.’ The audience laughs very loudly, which apparently wasn’t expected. Miranda has said, ‘I watch it slightly cringing going, “Oh, there shouldn’t have been a massive laugh there. Let’s crack on. It’s not that funny.”’

  As we know, Miranda quickly became a huge success, but it was the standard of writing which particularly impressed some of Hart’s peers. Friend and colleague David Baddiel congratulated the show: ‘It successfully uses the model of letting small mistakes by the main character grow into enormous, comic disasters, normally operating at least two, sometimes three, plotlines that all skilfully come together at the end.’

  So those weeks toiling over structure with James Cary and Richard Hurst were worth it in the end. Baddiel continued, ‘There are fabulous one-liners – such as in last Christmas’s show, when a glum, unhelpful Post Office worker at the collection depot tells Miranda, who is getting nowhere trying to pick up a package of presents, that his wife has just left him. She replies, “Did she leave a card so that you could collect her later?”’

  Clearly, those extra weeks spent adding jokes, redrafting and creating gag-graphs were well spent. But then Baddiel saved further acclaim for Miranda’s character, ‘which blends her acutely modern delivery with a more classic sitcom clown to create a genuinely new type of comic hero – a woman who continually breaks through her crippling self-consciousness with large, liberating, anarchic gestures’.

  With series one and two now firm favourites with audiences and critics alike, it seems that everyone is looking forward to the third series. BBC Writersroom asked Miranda how she would feel about someone else writing the show for her. She responded positively, but was concerned that other writers might not know the character well enough. ‘It would be lovely if there was someone there that got me, could write for me, find my voice and write the show. But at the moment I feel like only I would know that’. At the end of it all, Miranda has realised that all her hard work is worth it for the end result. ‘I’m beginning to think, Oh, hang on, I can call myself a writer now. That’s exciting.’

  11

  MIRANDA ARRIVES AT THE BEEB

  ‘It just brings joy to the heart. It’s just daft. I love the talking to camera. I think it’s a joy whenever she looks down the lens – it’s like Eric Morecambe.’

  – Kathy Burke

  And so, on 9 November 2009, Miranda Hart achieved her lifelong goal – her own BBC television sitcom series. She told one newspaper, ‘Since I can remember I have wanted to be a comedian and so to have my own show on the BBC is a total thrill, albeit slightly unnerving.’

  The pilot version of Miranda had been recorded in March 2008 with a slightly different cast. Most noticeably, Patricia Hodge was absent; Penny was played by Elizabeth Bennett, whose long career included roles in the 1980s sitcom Home to Roost, Jimmy McGovern’s The Lakes and the film Calendar Girls. Also appearing was Hyperdrive’s Stephen Evans. The pilot of Miranda was not broadcast, but sufficiently impressed BBC executives, and so a first series was commissioned.

  Calling the show Miranda wasn’t always the plan. Hart cheekily used it as a working title. ‘When I was writing it, I didn’t even think it would be commissioned. I just went with calling it my name because that was my absolute dream scenario, with no idea it would actually happen.’

  In the end, it was the producer’s idea to go with the eponymous title, and it made sense as the character appears in every scene and talks to the camera. It’s very much about Miranda. It was a bold move, though, following in the footsteps of other performers (usually American) whose sitcoms had been named after themselves: (Jerry) Seinfeld, Ellen (DeGeneres), (Bob) Newhart, Roseanne and Cybill (Shepherd). As Miranda herself has acknowledged, ‘It’s got that “Who does she think she is?” feel.’

  Unlike her US counterparts, though, Miranda didn’t have anywhere near the level of fame that usually suggests a self-titled show. Very few members of the public tuned into the show because they already loved her – it was usually because their friend had told them to check it out. ‘I have to call it “my show”,’ she said, ‘rather than its title Miranda because that feels very weird, being my name an’ all. In meetings I have to ask people to call it “the sitcom”, otherwise I hear “the thing about Miranda is…” or “when does Miranda finish?”’

  Being in the show’s production office, and hearing people answer the phone with the greeting ‘Hello, Miranda’ will always be odd. It might have inspired the line in the third episode of series two when Miranda is trying to lie to her friend Tilly and claims she’s making a programme for a production company called What’s It Called, for a channel called Who For: ‘Which is funny, because when people ring up, we say “Hello! What’s It Called” and they say “Don’t you know? It’s your company we’re ringing” and then they say, “Who are you making programmes for?” and we say “Who For” and they say, “Yes that’s what I’m asking you.” And we all laugh, so very much.’

  As we have seen, ‘the sitcom’, as Miranda prefers it to be called, started out in Edinburgh before being written as a TV pilot, then rewritten for BBC Radio 2 later in 2008 as Miranda Hart’s Joke Shop. Then it was adapted back again for television. The radio show had received critical acclaim and was even nominated for a Sony award. The Independent called it a ‘well-deserved TV transfer’.

  Miranda was commissioned by BBC Two alongside two other comedies, a new show called In My Country written by Simon Nye, creator of Men Behaving Badly, and the return of Gregor Fisher as Rab C. Nesbitt. Lucy Lumsden, BBC comedy commissioner, announced: ‘The return of a great character such as Rab C. Nesbitt, along with two new audience sitcoms, reflects the wide range of diverse, distinctive, quality comedy BBC Two continues to offer viewers.’

  While In My Country failed to progress any further than the pilot, recorded in May 2008, the channel’s audiences were glad to see the return of Glaswegian character Nesbitt in his first series for a decade. Meanwhile, there were rumbles in the media as Miranda and co. prepared for ‘the sitcom’. Executive producer Jo Sargent was quoted by Chortle as saying, ‘We are delighted to be working with Miranda – it is rare to find someone so uniquely talented.’

  If many were excited about the planned series, others were a little more doubtful. While this show was very different from what had come before, it bore similarities to what had come before that. The light-entertainment attitude of the 1970s which Miranda embodied was not very fashionable, as we’ll see later, but it had its supporters. The Word magazine would later write, ‘It actually comes as a blessed relief, an antidote to the seemingly endless darkness that has enveloped comedy over the past few years. Perhaps to watch something so simple and light at 8.30pm on a Monday night is just the ticket.’

  Writing in The Independent, Robert Hanks agreed, saying, ‘Miranda’s success reflects a certain public weariness with the comedy of outrage… Miranda belongs with The IT Crowd and Harry Hill’s TV Burp in a tradition of amiability and brazen silliness,
a school of comedy that wants its audience to laugh not out of shock or a refusal to be shocked, but out of delight.’

  So what is Miranda, and what makes it so special? Well, on the surface, it is a sitcom about a well-educated, socially awkward girl who owns a joke shop, trying to improve her life and get it on with the boy next door. She delegates all the work in the shop to Stevie, her self-important ‘little friend’, so she can set about the important task of ruining everything for herself. One reviewer described it as ‘a girly Black Books with penis-shaped pasta instead of books, and no alcoholism’.

  But it is much more than this. It has a potentially universal appeal. One reviewer for the Independent wrote, ‘It is the first new primetime sitcom I can recall that unites the whole family, all laughing their socks off.’ Slapstick spans age and even race – more about that later – so, in the same way all generations of the family can laugh at You’ve Been Framed, Miranda can provoke a giggle. One reviewer noted, ‘I bet kids loved the bit in the first episode where she was on the dance floor with her handsome crush and her skirt fell down, or when she fell over piles of boxes for no reason other than her awkwardness. Insecure girls, too, probably adore Miranda’s refusal to be cowed by her prettier, more popular friends, a pair of screeching materialist harridans pixelated by thoughts of marriage and wedding dresses.’