Even as recently as the 1990s, the studio audience sitcom was in rude health thanks to Absolutely Fabulous, One Foot in the Grave, Red Dwarf and Men Behaving Badly. But Mark Freeland, head of comedy productions at the BBC, believes that something changed in 1997: ‘The turning point was I’m Alan Partridge, when they came up with the hybrid format of filming with an audience, but putting four walls up. They shot single-camera in a cube, but with the audience watching on monitors. It teetered between the two formats, and it put a question mark under traditional sitcom.’
The next major development seemed to come in 2001 with the arrival of BBC Two’s The Office, with a brand of awkward realism which followed in the footsteps of the John Morton mock-documentary series People Like Us. The Office became a critical hit, attracted large audiences for the channel and left an indelible mark on British comedy. For years afterwards, most new shows were only shot using single cameras and were inspired by the mockumentary style. Lee Mack (Not Going Out) has commented, ‘Since The Office, everyone has this idea that comedy is only good if it reflects the way people really speak. But that’s nonsense – and it’s a problem that’s unique to comedy. If you went to a Picasso exhibition and said, “I love this painting of a horse,” and someone chirped up, “It doesn’t look anything like a horse – it’s not real,” they’d be seen as a real heathen.’
In recent years, admittedly, the most talked-about sitcoms have all been free of a studio audience: Peep Show, The Inbetweeners, Gavin & Stacey, The Thick of It and Outnumbered. Even when Miranda premiered, commissions for new shows shot without an audience continued to dominate. There was Grandma’s House, a Simon Amstell vehicle where his neurotic family try to cope with his career following his departure from Never Mind The Buzzcocks. There was The Trip, in which Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan play versions of themselves on a restaurant tour of the north of England. Getting On, with Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine, focused on the tensions and struggles of an NHS hospital ward for the elderly. Elsewhere, Tom Hollander played an inner-city vicar in Rev, and Alan Davies portrayed a celebrity chef in Whites.
But, while The Trip was a favourite with many critics and comedy fans, it was Miranda that achieved larger audiences. As the second series of Miranda began in November 2010, it was announced that its viewing figures each Monday not only bettered those of Panorama (aired on BBC One at the same time), but also were more than double the numbers for The Trip (another BBC Two Monday comedy).
It seemed that escapist comedy was what the British public was in need of. Miranda brought a fresh face and a modern angle to the traditional sitcom, and seemed to have inspired other commissions such as BBC One’s post-watershed Mrs Brown’s Boys. Even before the first episode was shown, it had gained a notoriety for its sweary nature, not least Brendan O’Carroll’s foul-mouthed Nan. There were 36 ‘feck’s in the first episode alone. Yet, aside from the filth, Mrs Brown’s Boys has all the makings of a traditional British sitcom: studio audience, small set, recurring characters and catchphrases.
Some viewers were left cold by the new show. Akava77 commented on the BBC website, ‘A dreadfully bad sitcom with cartoon opening credits, filmed in front of a studio audience where you can see the audience and camera/sound crew, over the top characters, silly make up and wigs, characters talking directly to the camera, daft voices, catchphrases and canned laughter at every single line said by every character.’
But enough people liked it, and a second series was commissioned. Even comedy critic Bruce Dessau, despite cautious reservation, could see some of its appeal: ‘Part of me wonders what the BBC was thinking when it chose to air Mrs Brown’s Boys, but another part of me thinks that it has come at precisely the right time. There has been much talk of a return to post-Office mainstream studio-based humour since the success of Miranda – and sitcoms don’t come much more mainstream than this.’
So, not only was Miranda a success, it has ushered in a new age of TV comedy, but, as one door has opened, another has to inevitably close. On 25 March 2011, Danny Cohen, controller of BBC One, announced the end of My Family, which had run for 11 series starring Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker. As well as being a long-standing fixture on the channel’s schedule, it holds an important place in sitcom history, as it was a conscious attempt by the BBC to use an American production process to create a show. In charge was Fred Barron, an executive who had worked on Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show in the US, and who appointed a team of writers, a set-up wildly different to that of Miranda’s solo project. ‘Up to 10 or 12 people were writing around a table and storylining,’ Hart explained. ‘I think two of them went away and actually wrote that episode but it would always be storylined by a group of people.’
Many are sad to see the demise of My Family, but critic Bruce Dessau summed up a lot of opinions when he suggested, ‘After more than 100 episodes, the decision comes not before time. Unless the writing is up to Simpsons-standard, there is only so long a television family can realistically exist without viewers getting tired of joining them in their living room.’ And, for many, losing the show’s best-loved character Nick, the eldest son who was played by Kris Marshall, signalled the beginning of the end. Dessau continued, ‘Younger characters have been introduced but the show has never recaptured its golden era of father–son hijinks between Lindsay and Kris Marshall, who left the series so long ago there must be people who think the only work he has ever done is irritate BT subscribers.’
Miranda, on learning of My Family’s cancellation, said that, after 11 years, ‘It’s not a slight to be taken off air, it’s an amazing achievement.’ She went on to say that it will be remembered for Lindsay and Wanamaker: ‘They put a lot of work in and they did fantastic performances that really endeared the nation to them. They were great, great comedy actors.’ So we bid goodbye to the Harpers and welcome in Miranda and her family.
Perhaps the thing that links Miranda and My Family, apart from the presence of appreciative studio audiences, is that it was loved by the viewers, even while critics were less enthusiastic. So what is it about Miranda that has such wide appeal? Surely we can’t all empathise with a tall and clumsy, middle-class lady who spends her inheritance on a joke shop? Or can we? The problems she faces are universal – how to get the guy and, ultimately, how not to look like an idiot. And, of course, being a sitcom character, she spectacularly fails at both.
Plenty love Miranda – the ratings alone have proved that – but many consider it a guilty pleasure. When Hart appeared on Loose Women, she believed that shows filmed in front of a live studio audience ‘by their very nature, seem uncool. You’ve got the audience laughing, they’re just less real.’ She considered that it’s also that they haven’t been around for a long time.
Panellist Sherrie Hewson (previously a cast member of Coronation Street) suggested to her that the rocketing ratings were a sure sign that audiences wanted more of this type of comedy. At this point, the studio audience cheered a ‘Yehhhh!’ of approval, and Sherrie concluded, ‘There you go, it’s the right time.’
Miranda’s past led her to love this light-entertainment style of comedy. While the alternative comedy scene was growing in comedy clubs in London and across the country, Miranda was at boarding school in Berkshire watching videos of Morecambe and Wise. Her favourite sitcoms were Are You Being Served? and Fawlty Towers. After she left boarding school, the 1990s brought Absolutely Fabulous and Gimme Gimme Gimme to feed her love of slapstick. ‘So I remained in this buffoony, clowny era, and just thought nothing had changed. Alternative comedy passed me by. I was like: “Who is Alexei Sayle?”’
Ever since Miranda, at the age of seven, had seen Eric Morecambe turn to look at the camera as part of the act, she thought, I want to do that one day. It became one of the things that made her want to get into comedy and she has made that kind of comedy her own. During a series of promotions for its ‘precision-engineered’ comedy (which also used material from Rev and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle), BBC Two chose t
he Miranda clip showing her look to camera in the very first episode, reacting to when the delivery man called her ‘Sir’.
One critic has described how Hart’s intricate performance delivered so much: ‘It’s not just a look to camera. It’s about four reactions, each one timed to perfection, each angle of the head expressing a tiny modulation in how she feels about it. Miranda can make a look to camera mean so many things: hope, joy, frustration, anger and despair, while still letting it do what it always needs to do in comedy – which is to punctuate the joke.’
In one look, Miranda will let the audience in on her secret naughtiness, whether it’s that she’s confessing (‘I do do that’), or that she’s desperate to get out of a situation (‘What am I doing?!’). This endears her to us, as we all have these faults and her honesty about it is extremely amusing. As Larry David, star of Curb Your Enthusiasm, told Ricky Gervais, ‘No one ever expresses the bad thoughts but the bad thoughts are funny.’
One of the other ‘old-fashioned’ devices used in Miranda is the 1970s-style ending. As each episode finishes, the words ‘You Have Been Watching’ appear on-screen as the individual members of the cast wave to the camera, much in the manner of David Croft’s sitcoms like Hi-de-Hi! and Dad’s Army. Hart explained why she chose to do this. ‘They’re so out of vogue, those shows, or there’s this slightly snobby attitude to them, so I thought, Well, I’m just going to embrace the genre for what it is. So I thought I’m going to blooming well do the 70s ending.’
Hart told one red-carpet interviewer that she still puts on Eric Morecambe videos now. ‘The light-entertainment 1970s campness is my thing.’ She also said that Not Going Out was an easy job to say yes to, partly to be able to work with Lee Mack and Tim Vine, but also because it gave her ‘the opportunity to do a studio audience sitcom which is a genre I love and, although making a bit of a comeback now, was hardly in existence a few years ago when I started to work’. But, as many commentators have noted, Miranda played a big role in that comeback.
On a red-button interview as an extra for its first series, Frank Skinner said, ‘There does seem to be a swingback but I do think – certainly as far as sitcoms are concerned – I think you’ve pioneered that.’ In 2004, Skinner had his own ITV sitcom, Shane, shot in front of a studio audience, but it was badly received and Skinner himself later admitted, ‘It was quite poor… In fact, the second series is still in a vault at ITV. So bad a sitcom, ITV wouldn’t put it out! I’m going to use that on the publicity for the DVD.’
Where Miranda succeeded, and Shane didn’t, was in the writing. Hart was aware of the differences between stand-up and sitcom, and understood the dynamics of filming in front of a live audience. Skinner told Miranda that he wrote his sitcom the same way he wrote his stand-up, and believed that was why it had failed. ‘I think plot, characterisation, all those things, some people see as essential. I just tended to like to get really big gags.’ And this seemed to come through to the viewers; as one commented on IMDb: ‘Basically, it’s his stand-up act CRAMMED into a sitcom format.’
Miranda, on the other hand, spent weeks with the help of experienced sitcom writers, honing the characters and painstakingly weaving together the different storylines.
As well as the writing, another key thing to consider with studio audience sitcoms is how it affects performance. There is a temptation for actors to play up to the audience, particularly for comedians who are used to bouncing off the crowd at gigs. Miranda spoke to her co-stars Sally Phillips (Tilly) and Adrian Scarborough (Dreamboat Charlie) about how they feel about acting in front of a live audience. Scarborough said that there wasn’t much difference in his approach to the acting, but it is more like theatre and compared it to his previous experience performing farce on stage. The main difference for him in sitcom performance was that it was more nerve-racking: ‘The bowel movements are different. More active on the live.’
Sally Phillips believed that the audience becomes part of the experience. ‘You have to wait for their laugh, quite apart from anything else… With single camera I am generally trying to make the person I’m acting with laugh. On this, I’m not trying to make them laugh, that would be bad.’ She also says that, because of the writing and the retro style of the show, harking back to the ‘grand old days of studio audience sitcoms’, the performances are bigger. ‘I think other studio audience sitcoms done in this country are not necessarily as big as this, performance-wise.’
Miranda finds it a tense experience too: ‘Studio shows are really terrifying because you have two-and-a-half days to get a half-hour show together. You do it in front of a live audience, you have two takes, max, and then that’s that, and then it goes on telly.’ If she considers this too much, it makes her nervous at the pressure of the situation, but usually Miranda just enjoys performing in front of her audience, not thinking too hard about the idea it will be broadcast. Essentially, it all comes down to the classic, almost clichéd, insecurity shared by many comic performers. ‘The idea of it being out there is nerve-racking, because if people don’t like it they basically don’t like me.’
Although Hart avoids reviews, people have (particularly on Twitter) alerted her to negative ones. Her biggest pet hate is being accused of adding a laughter track or ‘canned laughter’ to the show. From the moment the first series aired, she tweeted, ‘Those saying get rid of “laughter track” on the show. It ISN’T a laughter track. Was filmed in front of a LIVE audience. Sorry, they laughed!’ and then, ‘Whilst on the subject. “Canned” laughter hasn’t been around since 60s. All sitcoms with laughter are filmed in front of live audience. FACT.’
David Baddiel felt so strongly about the matter that he wrote a rather ranty piece for The Times about it: ‘Maybe Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In used canned laughter, and, you know what, so probably did The Hair Bear Bunch, but it hasn’t been used in any mainstream sitcom since. And yet every single review/preview of Miranda Hart’s new show, Miranda on BBC Two, that I’ve read, including the many positive ones, refers to the sound of the studio audience heard during the show either as canned, or as a “laugh track”.’
Baddiel blamed it on a general misunderstanding of sitcoms that, just because Miranda is filmed with multiple cameras in a studio, it should be considered old-fashioned. He pointed out that the single-camera, non-audience format is so much the norm nowadays that Miranda is actually ‘a radical departure’.
One interesting example where critics’ snobbishness towards audience laughter was misplaced came in 2002 when BBC Two broadcast the second series of I’m Alan Partridge. With some five years between series, some complained about the ‘addition’ of a laughter track, yet in fact the first series had also taken place with an audience. Defending himself on Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five Live show at the time of the original series two broadcasts, the show’s producer and co-writer Armando Iannucci pointed out, ‘It’s not canned laughter. We recorded it in front of a studio audience. If anything, I tried to tone it down. If Steve blows his nose there is a round of applause. I can’t say, “Can you not laugh at this?” or “Can you laugh a little bit less than that?” The first series also had the laughter as well.’
Iannucci also explained that the type of comedy suited the audience format, compared with more recent ‘downbeat’ comedies: ‘If we wanted to make The Office, we would have made another series of The Office but it’s a different world. The Office is very real, whereas Alan is very grotesque – Steve calls him uber-real… Maybe following on from The Office people were expecting more of the same. But there is a laughter track on Blackadder, and Morecambe and Wise wasn’t spoiled by the intrusive inclusion of a laughter track.’
In The Times in 2009, David Baddiel also noted that ‘when critics equate multicam audience sitcom with a perceived lack of sophistication, they seem to forget that Seinfeld, Frasier and Friends were all produced in this way’.
Chuck Lorre, creator of two of America’s top-rated sitcoms, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, explained his lov
e of the traditional audience sitcom to The New Yorker: ‘It’s a very intimate genre. There’s no music. There’s no camera magic. There are no editing tricks. It’s not a visual medium. It’s about people and words.’
As an interesting aside, when Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld first pitched what became Seinfeld to NBC, they wanted it to be done in a mockumentary style. Canadian critic Jaime Weinman explained in the Independent the restriction they faced: ‘The network said, ‘“No, you’re doing it on three cameras, in front of an audience.” So they accepted that, but they did it their own way. They broke the rules and changed people’s idea of what you could do with that format. All that has to happen now is for some network to force some writer to produce a sitcom for a studio audience. He won’t know the old tricks that people are tired of, so he’ll come up with new ones.’
It’s exactly the sort of philosophy that led Hart to come up with Miranda for a UK audience.
Despite all these disclaimers, Hart still found she had to explain the laughter of the studio audience after two series of her own show. Speaking to Fern Britton in late March 2011, she said, ‘The fear of not hearing a laugh in the first five minutes of your script is terrifying.’ When Fern asked, ‘Do you ever sneak in a laugh on the edit?’, Miranda held firm: ‘No, no. People still think it’s canned laughter. Even TV journalists have said to me, “I love your show, it’s a shame you had to put the laughter on”. It’s filmed in front of a studio audience! Look at me getting het up – I find it really annoying! No, it is real. A real audience and real laughter and, no, we wouldn’t put additional laughter on.’
Miranda Hart Page 16