Miranda Hart

by Sophie Johnson

  It turns out that this came from real-life experience. It was completely true, Miranda revealed. ‘No wonder it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I could talk to men without giggling shyly.’ She also mentioned that it was not the first time that Sarah Hadland had kissed a Doctor Who star on-screen; before Davison, she had kissed David Tennant in the 2007 comedy-drama Learners, in which Tennant teaches Jessica Hynes’s character to drive.

  Hart added mischievously, ‘I can also reveal that Patricia Hodge once sucked Tom Baker’s toe – although she didn’t say whether that was professional or personal. Either way, the image isn’t ideal, let’s be honest.’ What younger viewers may not have realised is that Davison and Hodge had regularly worked together before – they had starred in early-1980s sitcom Holding the Fort for ITV.

  Miranda’s third episode (‘Job’) finds our heroine trying to prove herself as a ‘career bitch’, despite her unstoppable habit of singing during interviews. As part of her new fitness regime, she braves the gym but realises it’s not for her – though rolling about on yoga balls is so Miranda. Hart revealed that filming the workout montage was very tiring, but points out on her blog that the sweat soaking her T-shirt was fake: ‘I was sprayed with water under the pits etc – it was rather nice on a hot June filming day.’ The yoga ball ‘stunt’ was inspired by a prank she had played while working: ‘I had done it with very large rolls of bubble wrap in an office when I was an office manager. (We all get our kicks somehow.)’

  Miranda tries her best to wriggle out of her membership contract with the gym but it is watertight, so next she threatens to escape via the loophole of anti-social behaviour: ‘If you don’t cancel my membership, I will… I will shit all over your towels.’ When that doesn’t work, she says she’ll break the swimming pool by ushering in ‘a mass of dirty dogs… and I will throw them in the pool along with a sheep covered in “pooballs”!’ Now at her wit’s end, she warns the gym receptionist that she will wee all over the ball pool – and it’s at this point that her new employer walks in, and fires her before she’s even started her new job. The receptionist says, if she stops her threats, she can have £5 off her monthly fee, and six weeks with a free instructor. She ends up falling for an extended 36-month contract when she discovers she’ll get a free towelling robe.

  It ends with a farcical sequence where Miranda is caught in a web of job lies, trying not to reveal to Tilly that she’s a waitress at Conky’s Grill, before insisting that she’s working in the forces. But then Gary saves the day, turning up in his RAF cadet uniform after a reunion and addressing Miranda as commander, before whisking her off her feet and carrying her out of the restaurant, a la Officer and a Gentlemen. For once it all works out. As Miranda put it, ‘marvelissa-Mussonlini!’

  Episode four (‘Holiday’) was director Juliet May’s favourite script and the one Miranda most enjoyed filming: ‘That could have been something to do with the dancing to Billy Joel,’ she said. It finds Miranda taking a holiday and included some more special guest stars. Dave Lamb, an actor who provides the sarcastic voiceover on Come Dine with Me, played Colin the businessman. Miranda described him as ‘very funny and also one of the nicest men I know’.

  Younger fans of the show were delighted, and possibly even went a bit giggly, with a cameo from the 20-year-old Skins actor Luke Pasqualino. The women on set were rather taken with him, as Miranda explained on her blog: ‘In the studio for this episode we had a hotel room set, so there was a bed, and at various intervals I would see women unashamedly asking Luke to lie on the bed and have their photograph taken with them. I think that might have included Patricia Hodge. Not a way to treat a guest actor. Very bad form. (I have my photo on my bedside table.)’

  In ‘Holiday’, to prove to her friends that she is spontaneous, Miranda tells them she is going to Thailand for a few days. But, hating travel and the unknown, she opts for the Hamilton Lodge, a hotel just around the corner. She makes the most of the facilities, watches films, orders numerous meals from room service and even orders ‘company’, which turns out to be an escort – and not just any escort, but Clive from the restaurant.

  Penny discovers her daughter’s true whereabouts when Miranda sneaks home to rescue all her trousers, and make the most of the Hamilton Lodge’s Corby trouser press. One of Miranda’s tactics to avoid being mistaken for a sad, lonely diner is to dress in a business suit so it looks like she is working. This ends up working almost too well, as Colin the businessman mistakes her for a woman called Amanda Barnes, whom he is expecting to present a seminar the next day. Miranda gets drunk and ends up giving away her whereabouts at the hotel to Gary who turns up there. She tries to convince him to ‘do a bit of the sex’, but she ends up passing out on top of him. On discovering the next morning that she has to lead the seminar for Colin, and discovers that Stevie is in the audience, she escapes out of the window. And she returns to something more her style – dancing in the restaurant to ‘Uptown Girl’ by Billy Joel.

  Robert Epstein, reviewing the show for the Independent, said he found Miranda to be something of a grower and says that this episode had him in fits: ‘Not for its originality of premise – taking on a self-improvement lecturer’s persona and playing merry hell with it is not exactly mind-blowing – nor the farce (one of the friends she lied to turns up as an “escort” she mistakenly ordered) but perhaps because it is impossible not to warm to someone so at ease with their own inadequacies.’

  In ‘Excuse’, the fifth episode, Penny is in her element, organising a Pride and Prejudice-themed party in order to set her daughter up with a man. But, when Stevie finds an online profile of Penny’s planned match for Miranda, Miranda does everything she can to avoid the party – even accepting a blind date arranged by Tilly.

  Dreamboat Charlie (Adrian Scarborough) turns out to be anything but dreamy; he’s a super toff who calls her a nice bit of totty. Tilly informs Penny that the date didn’t go well, so Miranda’s attendance at the party is expected. Finally, Miranda comes up with the only way to stop her mum trying to set her up with inappropriate men – to come out as a lesbian. Penny is delighted and makes it a ‘coming out’ party. Miranda is devastated when another party guest, Edmund Dettori (Alex Hassell), turns out to be ‘a handsome’. Miranda disappoints everyone by admitting she is actually straight, but then, when she hears Edmund speak (in an absurdly high-pitched voice), it’s a different matter. She runs away from the party, batting away protestations with cries of ‘Such fun! Such fun! Such fun!’

  Adrian Scarborough, making the first of two appearances in the series as Dreamboat Charlie, told Miranda that he didn’t mind being cast for parts on the basis of his looks: ‘I’m very grateful for it because I’ve got a lot of money and made a career out of it. I’d much rather be short and fat and ginger with a big nose than a sort of rather dashing debonair… I’d rather be a character actor because I think you get much more interesting parts.’

  The first series drew to a close on 14 December 2010. Miranda took the opportunity on her blog to bid farewell to her viewers. ‘It has been a pleasure and thank you so much for watching and being interested. It means a hell of a lot,’ she wrote. ‘This profession is insecure breeding enough but putting a show out there with your name in the title, and playing “yourself”, was always going to be a risk, so I am grateful for anyone who stuck by it. Thank you… Time to say goodbye. Come on, no tears.’ In the sixth and final episode of the series, ‘Dog’, Miranda and Stevie compete for the attention of Robert Husband (Philip Brodie), a man who left his wallet at the shop. They discover a card in his wallet advertising a self-defence class, which they decide to attend. They also discover a picture of a dog in the same wallet, which leads Stevie to get herself a Great Dane. When Husband turns up at the joke shop, he avoids the matter of whom out of Miranda and Stevie he would prefer to take out for dinner. He manages to escape, but Miranda is undeterred and decides to try to attract his attention by getting a dog of her own to rival Stevie’s acquisition. But, whi
le Stevie has an amusingly sized Great Dane, Miranda has a Chihuahua Titan.

  Meanwhile, Penny is trying to give Miranda advice to make sure she doesn’t embarrass herself at the Henley Regatta, while Clive persuades Miranda to tell Gary how she feels about him, in order to stop him going abroad to Hong Kong. She comes up with the perfect romantic speech and rehearses it in her head, but, when it comes to saying it, Gary and Clive are distracted by Titan, and Miranda muddles up its delivery. In the park, Robert ‘wallet guy’ Husband sees the girls with their dogs and – as Miranda has just run out from weeing in a bush, with trousers round her ankles – says he would prefer to take Stevie. He asks her if she would like to go for a drink and the two of them react with disgust.

  At Gary’s leaving party, he asks Miranda to dance, and as the music changes to a slow number he says he wants to talk to her, but Stevie honours a pact made earlier and swiftly changes the song, inspiring the whole room to burst into a rendition of the conga. Another chance blown for Miranda, and, with Gary off to Hong Kong, might it be her last?

  Miranda wrote on her blog: ‘As you will see in this episode I leave a little bit of a cliff hanger in terms of my relationship with Gary (Tom Ellis). Here’s hoping I get a chance to write more episodes and finish the story, but, if I don’t, it has been a real joy and experience to have done the series.’

  Fortunately, it was clear that Miranda would return for a second series. Whichever way you look at it, it was successful. Fans, critics, fellow comedians and even her family loved the show. But it was the end of an exciting journey, and it’s not surprising that she got a little emotional. ‘Last show done,’ she tweeted. ‘Series over. I am not going to lie I’ve had a little cry.’

  Hart was oblivious to reviews praising the show – she wasn’t confident enough to read them first-hand – until others told her of the acclaim: ‘People were saying, “You know it’s going all right reviews-wise.” Then, around episode four, they told me the viewing figures – three million. I was like, wow… that is good, right?’

  Bruce Dessau, writing for the Guardian’s TV blog, cited his favourite moments as Miranda’s now-famous looks to the camera: ‘What made Miranda so memorable, apart from the sublime slapstick tumbles, was the way she constantly acknowledged the viewer, shamelessly mugging to the screen… The success of Miranda – one of the few recent sitcoms that is truly laugh-out-loud funny – demonstrates that whether one describes it as mugging to the camera like a demented vaudevillian, or gets all structuralist and calls it the apotheosis of self-referential po-mo dislocation, pulling a face on-screen will always be a hit.’

  Her show seemed to have universal appeal. The gossipy towers of Heat magazine applauded: ‘As we reach the end of the series, let’s all acknowledge (yes, all of us) that this has been the flat-out funniest thing on television for ages, mixing silliness with smartness… Roll on series two!’

  The respected industry weekly Broadcast was similarly smitten: ‘She’s a big lass… and funny. And I don’t mean whimsical, wry, dark or clever, I mean fart gags, chocolate willies and ludicrous set-ups that deliver great visual gags!… I laughed, out loud, a lot.’

  It seemed that many were grateful for this outbreak of innocent fun and laughter on our screens, rather than the dark, challenging material which had been fashionable in TV comedy. Marsha Coupe wrote in the Sunday Times’ Culture supplement: ‘How refreshing to watch Miranda (BBC Two), a half-hour show free of the hateful filth that usually passes for humour.’

  But, as always, thanks to the subjective nature of comedy, what one person may love may be loathed by another. One reviewer for the daily freesheet Metro did not hold back, drawing comparisons with a controversial Have I Got News For You joke made at the expense of the royal family: ‘Anyone tuning in hoping for some edgy “kraut Queen” jokes would have been sadly disillusioned. Chocolate penises (penii?) was as risqué as it got, which is fine if you find cacao-based genitalia intrinsically amusing. If not you had to suck on a lot of knowing asides to camera and the gauche charms of Miranda, which, after the umpteenth time she’d gone tongue-tied and bonkers in the presence of her dream man, wore pretty thin.’

  But the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan is definitely a supporter of the show. She commented, ‘I love it for exactly the same reasons many people seem to hate it – because it’s not a high-powered, finely tuned precision piece of American sitcom engineering. Much as I love those too, there is room in my life for something gentler and more endearing – something in which you can immerse yourself as you would a warm bath.’

  Hart’s fellow comedian (and her Alpen advert co-star) Arabella Weir agreed, saying that she has a natural talent. ‘She can’t not be funny: everything about her – her expressions, her mannerisms, her pauses, even her silences – are funny. It is an unlearnable and rare quality.’ Apparently it was laugh at first sight, as Weir recalled, ‘I first saw her on an audition tape along with about 20 others, and before she’d opened her mouth I shouted, “I want to work with her. She’s hilarious,” and I was right. Miranda is a one-off.’

  David Baddiel echoed this view in an article he dedicated to Hart: ‘There’s a phrase – funny boned – that is sometimes overused in comedy to describe those performers who can get laughs without saying anything: just by the way they are, the way they hold themselves, the way they move. It’s commonly used to describe Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper. It should also be used to describe Miranda Hart.’

  Charlie Higson admired how Hart has overcome the conventions of cool which can stifle TV comedy at times: ‘When Miranda first appeared on our screens, some TV critics were sniffy – “This can’t be right, it looks like an old-fashioned situation comedy! It’s filmed on dodgy borrowed sets. It isn’t modern and trendy and filled with jokes about anal sex.” But they’d missed the point. The point being, of course, that Miranda is just gloriously funny. That’s all you need to say.’

  Even more startling, perhaps, were the reactions from fanatical viewers. There are a number of fan blogs that post quotes, pictures and clips from the show; fan videos uploaded of clip montages, and scenes of Miranda and Gary set to love ballads; there are Twitter accounts dedicated to tweeting Miranda’s latest news. And then, there is Miranda’s NBLF (Nutty But Lovely Fivesome). These are five young ladies that admire and idolise Miranda Hart. Simply put – they are her biggest fans. They are Rosie, Roma, Amber, Genevieve and Jess, the last of whom seems to be the leader of the gang. She’s certainly the most committed – she posted a video to Twitter that began, ‘Today, I have been making my room into a Miranda Hart shrine.’

  It should be made clear that this isn’t one of those creepy shrines with candles and voodoo – it’s simply a wall papered with Miranda paraphernalia. There are stills from the series, promotional shots, a picture of her together with Hart, her programme from the recording, her ‘production guest’ ticket, the ‘reserved’ sign from her seat at the recording, her favourite quotes (ordered by series one, series two, interviews and Hyperdrive) and a printout of tweets she has received from the lady herself.

  Another fan called Kirsty also posted a picture on Twitter, which showed her bedroom wall saturated with photos of Miranda.

  Hart’s family seems to like her sitcom, although she acknowledges that their approval may have a lot to do with the fact her style is mainstream. ‘If I was doing really edgy or dark or rude stuff, I think my mum would be a bit like, “Oh yes. No, that’s not my daughter”… wouldn’t mention me down the WI, you know. So she got lucky with me from that point of view, but, yeah, I think they’re really proud.’

  With such fantastic ratings and a positive response, it seemed inevitable a second series would follow, and so it did. BBC Comedy commissioner Cheryl Taylor said at the end of 2009, ‘It’s rare that a debut series provokes such an ecstatic response and we are delighted that Miranda’s special brand of warm and distinctive comedy will be back to delight audiences again next year.’

  Ultimately, the main reason for the s
itcom’s success is Miranda Hart herself, both the writer and the character, as developed through her stand-up persona. Sally Kinnes of the Sunday Times wrote, ‘Stand-up success and great sitcom-writing rarely go together, but Miranda Hart’s semi-autobiographical material – posh girl from boarding school struggles to cope with body image, misanthropy and trouser presses – makes the perfect transition. It’s like French and Saunders in the early days.’

  But where does Miranda end and Miranda begin?

  13

  REALITY BLURS

  ‘I’m not quite as mad as the sitcom Miranda!’

  – Miranda

  As Miranda Hart plays Miranda, a predictable question she is often asked is how much of her is in the character. She explained to BBC Writersroom how the character was born: ‘Well, I developed this stand-up persona, and that’s where it all started from. I realised I was getting laughs being a version of me.’

  As many artists are advised when they start out, Miranda writes about what she knows, by starting from herself and exaggerating her persona in order to create the perfect sitcom character. ‘I’m pleased to say I did have to exaggerate for comedic effect,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t entirely autobiographical… But I do bring myself to all my performances. I’ve just taken that sort of feeling to its extreme.’ She writes about her loves and her hates, and has even lifted some anecdotal material from her real life, but when it comes to the Miranda who owns a joke shop she stressed, ‘I do feel like I’m playing a character. It’s not really me.’

  There are things she shares with her screen self. They both went to boarding school and shared a dorm with girls who had ridiculous nicknames, but Miranda insisted the real-life ones weren’t quite as bad. ‘My school didn’t have lots of moneyed, King’s Road Tilly types, so I got lucky, as boarding schools go.’