Miranda Hart - Such Fun. Sophie Johnson
love silliness and I find life quite boring. I don’t like the responsibility of being an adult – I want to be making fun and lightness out of things. Being told “Don’t be silly” as a child really pissed me off, so I thought, “OK, I’ll be silly for a living then.”’
Destined for comedy, Miranda was always the class clown and, as she told Alan Carr on Channel 4’s Chatty Man, ‘I always thought I was hilarious, whether I was or not.’ In her formative years, Miranda got her kicks performing silly pranks and practical jokes, whether staying in a cupboard all lesson, only to reveal herself two minutes before the end with a ‘Sorry I’m late’, or going through the hassle of getting a sheep from the nearby fields and putting it in her dormitory, just to hear their teacher say, ‘Who’s put a sheep in here?’ Very silly indeed.
She has recalled one particular classroom prank, although denies performing it herself. Once in class with a certain Mrs Thwaites, who had a very long, thin plait, one of her classmates cut it off while she was facing the blackboard. It’s this sort of carelessness, common in childhood where there’s little awareness of any consequences, which is replicated throughout Miranda.
There are several moments in the series which hint towards those sorts of classroom antics. In the third episode of series two, a flashback shows the young Miranda galloping down the school corridor. A teacher shouts at her, ‘Hart! Don’t run in the corridor!’
She replies confidently, ‘It’s a gallop, miss. I think all businessmen should do it, and one day I hope to tell the nation via a TV show.’
The teacher humours her. ‘Oh, Hart. With that naïve optimism, you gallop, girl. It’s the only you you’ll ever know.’ That (presumably imaginary) teacher could not have been more wrong.
In an interview with the BBC’s Writersroom website, Miranda confesses that she has wanted to be a comedian as long as she can remember, to the point of wanting her own show on the BBC. Aged only six, she had seen Tommy Cooper, and knew even then that making people laugh was what she wanted to do. She has mentioned other comic greats as inspiration – Morecambe and Wise (Eric Morecambe especially), French and Saunders, Tony Hancock and Joyce Grenfell. And there are similarities between Hart and all of her comic heroes:
She and Hancock both star in eponymous sitcoms playing exaggerated versions of themselves. The audience feel warmth through the failure and ineptitude of Miranda’s character the same way they did for Hancock. The same feeling could be said to be elicited by Tommy Cooper and his charmingly flawed magic tricks. Like French and Saunders, she isn’t afraid of being a female clown – whether it be dressing in unflattering outfits, or falling fantastically arse over tit. She’s got the well-spoken inflections of Joyce Grenfell. But perhaps most of all, she is the modern, female incarnation of the late Eric Morecambe. When she turns to camera with that look, we get a mischievous feeling we’re part of something the others on the screen aren’t. We’re in on the joke.
Miranda has said that, when she saw Morecambe’s looks to camera on TV, she thought, ‘Ooh! He’s looking at me; I want to do that.’ And do it she has, with great aplomb. On the red carpet, when she was nominated for a BAFTA, she told one reporter she couldn’t quite believe her luck: ‘Twelve-year-old me would be going mental right now.’
She has that peculiar British brand of comedy – a combination of self-deprecation, sarcasm and slapstick. She blames being away at boarding school for missing out on seeing much of the alternative comedy scene of the 1980s but her influences have brought to the public a much-missed brand of humour: the light-entertainment style of the 1970s, a nostalgic kind of reminiscence for some of us, and something fun and new for others. Our beloved Miranda Hart was always destined to be a star of the comedy world – and wanted it more than anything – but, as we shall discover in the following chapters, it didn’t come easily to her.
‘When I see a tall woman, I’m always slightly like, woah, it looks weird, but that could be because of my complex about it, my worry over whether it’s womanly to be that tall.’
– Miranda
Actress and comedian Miranda Hart is the star of Miranda, but her alter ego in the series – joke-shop owner – is the butt of most of the jokes, lots of them revolving around her appearance. There is much speculation about how autobiographical the sitcom is, and how similar Miranda is to her on-screen persona, but we’ll look into that more a little later. What is clear is that her appearance has played an important part in how she feels about herself, as well as being a source of comic material. Self-penned jokes about her size stem from a dark time in Miranda’s life. ‘In terms of my character, I did very much start from myself. Then I’d get too sad and morose and angry, so I had to find the fun side of my teenage angst.’ Unlike her happy-go-lucky schooldays of galloping around corridors and being a popular lacrosse player, her teenage years and early twenties were pretty low times.
After winning the People’s Choice Award, the comic expressed her surprise at her new-found popularity. She had been so busy that she regarded the viewing figures abstractedly as mere numbers, and she hadn’t read any reviews. Why, though? Miranda hates the way she looks and journalists seem to fixate on her appearance almost as much as she does. ‘People are obviously going to mention what I look like, but it’s a shame it has to be a key part. I can’t just be Miranda.’ And who can blame her for avoiding reviews when papers have described her in such unflattering and even unpleasant terms as ‘lady-mountain Miranda Hart’, ‘a human stegosaurus’ or ‘huge and hugely unfanciable’. ‘One of those comments is OK,’ Hart has argued, ‘you can deal with it, but, if you read 60, even the strongest person would start feeling low.’
While Miranda remains understandably sensitive about certain comments regarding her appearance, she is still dedicated enough to comedy to courageously send herself up so frequently in her act, with so many laughs reliant on her size and clumsy nature. She is mistaken for a transvestite, addressed as ‘Sir’ by a delivery man and constantly called ‘Queen Kong’ by her old boarding-school friends. Now, Miranda is happy in herself, but still avoids reading reviews as it takes her back to unhappier times. ‘I’m quite a confident person in many ways, but there’s only so much you can hear about being compared to Hattie Jacques. For the record, she was a comedy goddess, but she was 25 stone. I hope I’m right in saying I’m not in any way nearly 25 stone.’
And she doesn’t appear to be embarrassed by her body, willing to bare all for a laugh. Social awkwardness and being naked in public seem to go together for her comic creation, and the big-knickered Miranda does it so brilliantly and in such a typically English fashion. Her dress getting stuck in a taxi door and being ripped off wouldn’t be nearly so funny if it revealed a supermodel figure in sexy matching undies, rather than the looming figure in galumphing pants we are treated to.
In one newspaper interview, the journalist is interrupted by the comic’s PR saying that they need to start make-up. Grimacing, Miranda says, ‘They probably looked at the state of me and thought, We’d better get her over there as quickly as possible.’ It seems that, despite being branded ‘Crush of the Week’ in another paper, and her immense popularity across the nation, Miranda still hates the way she looks. ‘I’m happy socially and I’ve got good friends, but everyone has got their thing, haven’t they? And mine is I don’t like looking in the mirror.’ She has also said that she can’t imagine anyone finding her attractive. This insecurity came from years of feeling she was different and being told by casting agents she did not fit the mould of the business they call show.
At 16 years old, she was already 6ft 1in and was very thin. People laughed at her gangliness and clumsiness. ‘I was always tripping over and knocking into things, because I didn’t realise how wide my wingspan was.’ She wasn’t too worried about her height, but family and friends kept reassuring her that it was OK to be tall, people kept referring