I so want to love Miranda — but her show just isn’t funny any more
HOW many times can one woman fall off a bar stool? Miranda Hart does it like a turkey tumbling out of a tree: hands flapping desperately as she topples, trying to defy gravity all the way down. Once, it’s amusing. Twice, it’s repetitive. The third time, it’s stale. After that it is just lazy.
Her self-titled sitcom — starring, created and written by Miranda — was labelled ‘comedy Marmite’ by the Radio Times this Christmas: a show that millions adore and millions more can’t stand. But that’s not quite true. Some people love Miranda; the rest of us want to love it. It could be the best thing on TV — but often it’s painful to watch.
I’ve been willing Miranda Hart to become a national treasure ever since I overheard a senior commissioning editor at the BBC, discussing names to front a documentary series, dismiss her with the words: ‘Very clever girl, really funny . . . shame she’s so ****ing ugly.’
In that instant, he revealed the sexism at the Corporation’s highest levels and the scale of the challenge facing female comedians.
The BBC ought to be backing Miranda to the hilt, recruiting the best writers to make her show the finest in its schedules. Instead, it has been allowed to be self-indulgent and flabby, with overwritten jokes and over-played slapstick.
And when the viewing figures start to fall, you know there will be a roomful of suits all too ready to say: ‘It’s a fact of life — you can’t find a funny woman.’
Nor does Miranda do much to challenge BBC prejudices against women, when its cast features so many stock characters from the monstrous regiment of two-dimensional females.
There’s the mother, played by the redoubtable Patricia Hodge as a nag and snob quick to belittle her daughter. She’d be a walking motherin-law joke, except Miranda isn’t married.
And there’s the perpetual baby, Stevie, who collects cutesie plastic novelties, and Hooray Henrietta Tilly. Stereotypes one and all.
Miranda is a one-dimensional caricature: big, clumsy, hopeless with men. A woman defined and limited by her height and mannish shoulders.
It’s frustrating because when she is reined in and given a t op - notch script with sensitively written dialogue, she can be effortlessly funny — and even heartbreaking.
In the well- crafted BBC drama Call The Midwife, she plays a character not f ar removed from the sitcom.
Camilla Fortescue-CholmeleyBrowne, or Chummy for short, is dreadfully earnest, gauche and lovable. She is over-sized and lumbering, apologetic and ashamed, but, oh, how we root for Chummy!
In the Christmas Day episode, only kind-hearted, see-thebest- i n- everyone Chummy could have noticed a teenage girl secretively reading a pamphlet on pregnancy and assumed she was a wouldbe midwife, i nstead of an unmarried mother-to-be.
AND only bi gboned, lumbering Chu mmy (Hart is 6ft 1in) could have melted our hearts when she whispered to her husband-tobe: ‘ You’re the only one who can make me feel small.’
But in Miranda, left to her own devices, Hart’s physical clumsiness is the beginning and end of her character.
When Miranda throws herself off another bar stool, it’s simply exasperating. You want to shout: ‘ At least make an effort to stay upright!’
What Hart is trying to do is admirable. She clearly wants to create a mainstream sitcom that harks back to the glory days of Some Mothers Do Have ’Em and The Goodies. These were unpretentious comedies, aimed at raising belly laughs from the whole family.
But they were also meticulously crafted by actors and writers who worked painstakingly to create extraordinary physical comedy.
The spiritual f ather of Miranda is Frank Spencer, played in Some Mothers by Michael Crawford as a lisping, beret-wearing half-wit who couldn’t open a cupboard door without knocking himself out.
When Frank hurtled under an articulated lorry on run- away rollerskates, in a moment of iconic slapstick, he was performing a stunt t hat demanded split-second timing and weeks of planning.
When Miranda falls over a coat rack, shop dummy or any of a hundred other convenient objects, it usually looks like a sight gag thrown in on the spur of the moment.
And even then, the timing is regularly off — trip, stumble and then, in case we haven’t seen it, a lunge to the floor.
Too often, Hart follows it up with a punchline, spoken straight to camera, that simply explains what we’ve just seen.
One bit of slapstick in an earlier series that could have been glorious involved a pair of giant inflatable gym balls.
Instead of doing tummy crunches, Hart hurled herself chest- f i rst onto the balls, surfed over them and hit some yoga mats with a thwack that rubbed her face halfway round her head.
And then she killed the laugh, by proclaiming to the viewers: ‘ That’s what they’re used for!’
A glance straight to camera can be a great technique for raising laughs, but that’s all it should be — a glance, not an ongoing conversation.
It all feels so laboured, so ponderous. When John Cleese was knocked halfsenseless by a falling moose’s head i n Fawlty Towers, it seemed entirely natural — who hasn’t botched a bit of DIY and seen a shelf or painting fall off the wall?
When Miranda lands headfirst, we see it coming from a mile off.
When Hart gets it right, she’s hilarious. In one favourite moment, feeling the heat at a garden party, she pulls her jumper over her head — and her shirt comes off with it, too.
She finds herself standing in just a bra in front of her mother and sundry guests.
She looks at the tangle of clothes i n her hands and, making a bad moment worse, gasps: ‘The shirt’s run off with the jumper like a whore!’
It’s a good line and many of us will recognise the moment when you start pulling off a jumper and realise just in time that your untucked shirt is coming off with it.
So, it seems all the more laboured when she gets her skirt caught in the door of a taxi and is left in nothing but bra and panties as the car drives off, taking the rest of her outfit with it.
This is simply improbable in the way the garden party incident isn’t.
As Kenny Everett’s porn queen character used to exclaim: ‘ Suddenly, all my clothes fall off!’
It’s great when Miranda goes to air kiss a man she fancies and accidentally catches him on the l i ps: such things happen. Many of us will blush to remember similar incidents when we’ve failed to anticipate a second air kiss and found ourselves half- kissing a colleague or a mother-in-law.
But it’s not so great when Miranda leaps on a sushi conveyor belt and goes crawling after the dish she wants: these things simply don’t happen.
Where does this clumsy persona, an overgrown public schoolgirl forever falling over her hockey stick, end and where does the real Miranda Hart begin?
She has admitted she has a more fragile side, prone to ‘depression, moments of boredom, loneliness’ but it’s the silly, slipping-on-banana-skins Miranda we meet most often.
It’s not just TV audiences who see this side of Miranda Hart; the book-buying public have also been treated to it.
Her best- selling book Is It Just Me? was Amazon’s No. 1 biography over Christmas, just as Miranda was top of the Boxing Day viewers’ rankings.
‘ Has anyone else, while negotiating a slippery prawn in a smart restaurant , catapulted said prawn over their shoulder so it hit their next- door diner in the eye?’ she asks in the introduction.
‘Does anyone else have trouble negotiating these sorts of life hiccups . . . or is it just me?’
It’s not just her, of course. There’s a nationwide yearning to share her mishaps. Many of us will, at some point in our lives, have felt out of place, socially a wk wa r d and bumbling. Miranda reassures us that we are not alone.
That’s why it’s so disappointing when she spells out the j okes onscreen i n capital letters or lets them drag on and on. That’s why the canned laughter is so irritating.
When something is rammed down your throat, the natural reaction is to choke on it.
One running gag is her love of eating. In the first episode of the new series, after she had stolen a mouthful of Christmas pudding from the fork of her friend Stevie, Miranda explained what the season meant to her: ‘All the food, and the pressies, and the food, and the music, and the food, and the fires, and the food, and the food . . . and the food.’
‘You’re obsessed with food,’ retorted Stevie. That boneidle line should never have got past the first draft — to leave it in the final take is verging on criminal. Compare t hat with t he sublime sequence of scenes in the first series of Call The Midwife when Chummie learns to ride a bike — the nurses’ principal means of transport t hr o ugh t he streets of London’s East End.
THE bike is t oo small, Chummie is too big, she wobbl e s and l oses control, and the local children laugh at her. She even — this is Miranda Hart, after all — falls off. But with quiet dignity she perseveres and is soon pedall i ng serenely through the streets, still too large for the bike, but with her face shining with pride. This is Miranda at her most charming.
It’s i mpossible to dislike Hart. Unlike many smug male comics, she is never nasty or obnoxious. Which is why, when she is lazy or obvious, as in the worst moments of Miranda, it’s infuriating and disappointing — but we watch her more in sorrow than in anger.
Until she raises her sights and drops the self-indulgent excesses, t hough, she is doomed to coast along in a lazy public-school rut.
C- minus f or effort, must try harder.