Miranda Hart - The Biography. Sophie Johnson
and cater for every taste, as she has Tennent’s Lager, After Eights, Quality Street and a bowl of Es. The audience play a game of pass the parcel while Miranda tells them about her middle-class friends.
Also in the cast for House Party was Neil Edmond, who played Miranda’s cousin. Edmond was a member of sketch group The Consultants with Justin Edwards and James Rawlings, and they had won the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer in 2002. More recently, he has appeared in such series as BBC7’s Knocker, and in TV shows such as Jack Dee’s Lead Balloon and indeed Miranda itself. In the Edinburgh run of House Party, as her cousin, Edmond fills in for Miranda while she changes into costume for the various party guests she plays. They include Poo, her ‘jolly hockey sticks’ horsey friend; the guy she had a crush on at university; and the girlfriend who tells gushing tales about her fiancé, undercut by her denial of sadness at his not marrying her.
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.
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