Miranda Hart

Why We Love Miranda

The simple answer is because it's good. Yes, every now and then it does happen and somebody comes up with a decent, honest to goodness, line and length studio-based sitcom. And with Miranda, writer and series lead Miranda Hart has done just that.

When Miranda saw the Doctor...

"Well my friends, hello again. It's Monday - that can only mean one thing - you are beside yourself with excitement about seeing Episode Two of my show."

For several years Miranda Hart has been cheerfully stealing scenes from under the noses of her more illustrious co-stars, so it was only a matter of time before TV producers rewarded her with a comedy series of her own.

Episode one of Miranda would appear to justify their faith. It has a genuine sense of fun, a distinct style, several very sharp lines and some cleverly constructed set-pieces. But, God, it was manic. In the words of Michael Winner in that memorably atrocious insurance advert: "Calm down, dear."

Hart, who also wrote the script, works very hard for her laughs, but an occasional change of pace would have been very welcome. It might also have afforded a little breathing space for some character development, which was in seriously short supply. A disproportionate amount of the jokes were predicated on Hart's size, which, personally, I don't find particularly disproportionate.

When not addressing the camera, Hart is busy bantering with joke shop co-owner Stevie (Sarah Hadland), being socially inept and lusting after hunky chef Gary (Tom Ellis) who, in an interesting reversal of traditional sitcom gender objectifying, is underwritten to the point of non-existence. Hart is much more generous towards her female co-stars, providing Patricia Hodge and Sally Phillips with the opportunity to do some scene-stealing of their own as neurotic mother and bitchy best friend respectively.

Miranda is apparently created in a 1970s retro sitcom factory in which leftover bits of Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal had been mixed up with some Cath Kidston wallpaper to create a kind of comedy mache, if you will - which was in turn left to dry inside a set made of balsa wood and tissues (though sadly not in front of a live studio audience) before viewers are invited to see whether their laughter makes it fall over or merely wobble a bit before righting itself...

Comedically speaking, Miranda Hart's size is apparently everything, so I fear she can never be considered funny outside of the context of her height, and nobody ever says that about Stephen Merchant.

Hart presumably came to terms with the innately sexist Tall = Funny equation (she's 6ft 1in) some years ago, so gags focusing on the idea of a thirtysomething woman who is clearly slightly surprised to be 6ft 1in are bound to feel a bit weird, as if Hart had only just swallowed the contents of the "Drink me" bottle and woken up all oooooh-errr!

But if you can accept the idea that a large lady tripping over cardboard boxes a lot, and being styled like Danny La Rue ("Oh Miranda, why are you dressed like a transvestite?!"), and having an unrequited crush on a handsome chef, not to mention Patricia Hodge as her elegantly trim mother, are intrinsically amusing, then Miranda is very amusing.

For everybody else, though, it's merely a cheap-looking sitcom starring a big girl who keeps being mistaken for a man ("Did he just call me Sir?"), despite not looking remotely like one. Kind of camp, sort of silly and a little bit sweet, but not, I think, quite enough of any of those to matter, Miranda feels like a throwback to an ancient, lost comedy era that is, if not quite pre-Cambrian, then certainly mid-20th century, pre-Cowell.

A verse of Cole Porter's song Be a Clown goes: "Why be a great composer with your rent in arrears/Why be a major poet and you'll owe it for years?/When crowds'll pay to giggle if you wiggle your ears?/Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown."

Miranda Hart, who plays 'herself' in the new comedy series Miranda, has studied the meaning of the song and has had the guts and the talent to follow its guidance. Guts, because the comedy centres on her ungainliness - too tall (over six feet) for modishness, not fat but too fleshy; big feet and hands; a long face made lovely only with a smile. Talent, in living up to her billing as a successor to the now middle-aged Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, with whom she has worked and from whom, it seems, she has learned much.

And part of that learning is that clowning is a hard matter, especially if - instead of wearing flapping shoes, baggy pants and a red nose - you present yourself to the camera and say: here am I, mid-thirties, look like this, no boyfriend, what are the chances? Come and laugh at me finding out.

All this is clowning, but with sophistication. Miranda - as her name, education and mother's comportment betray - is upper middle-class, but neither she nor the class is mocked for it: the comedy lives in a world where, even in Surrey, there is a downside, as well as an upside, in being raised this way. The two friends are ghastly, not in an upper-class way but rather in seeking to live like pseudo-celebrities, all shrieks and "Omigods!" and shopping therapy. The farcical episodes - knocking over coat stands, being mistaken for a transvestite, licking a chocolate penis (part of her stock) in the street - succeed each other naturally and hilariously because they are linked back to the central character, whose brilliance shines the more in what had been something of a parched season for comedy.

Miranda Hart is very tall and, from certain angles, looks a bit like a man. That's not me talking, that's the set-up for Miranda, a sitcom that feels like it's been beamed in from the 1970s in which the titular heroine makes jokes about her height and being mistaken for a bloke. There are times when you don't know whether to laugh or cry, but not in a good way.

That's a little unfair. Any show that contains the line "I look like I've had a chiffon-based anaphylactic shock" (Miranda had donned a super-sized wedding frock) is not entirely without merit. So credit where it's due: there were more laughs in last night's opening episode than in the entire series of Lunch Monkeys, Home Time and Mumbai Calling put together. Faint praise, admittedly. Still, that's as good as it gets.

For anyone tuning in hoping for some edgy 'kraut Queen' jokes would have been sadly disillusioned. Chocolate penises (penii?) was as risque 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 dreamman, wore pretty thin. Miranda is tall and she looks a bit like a man: but that don't make her Rhoda.

On her new sitcom Miranda, Miranda Hart has set herself the difficult job of making an irritating and socially awkward character watchable. She worked hard last night by sub-vocalising her thoughts, talking to camera, showing us fantasy sequences and doing more pratfalls than Lucille Ball. She's funny.

Yet a series based on a young woman's ugliness worries me and so does one predicated on the idea that she must marry. I suppose it is progress that the tall, goofy Hart gets to star at all. In the good old, bad old days, she would be writing for her attractive co-star Sally Phillips. But she, oddly, is currently a radio star.

Get ready for Miranda

"Hope you enjoy the show tonight. I can't believe it's going out (this has been years in the coming). My career either takes off or comes to a said end tonight...!"

Miranda Hart and Patricia Hodge drive this amusing rather than funny sitcom. Somehow, we like it more than we should. Give it a try.

Miranda Hart, aka the dozy cleaner out of Lee Mack and Tim Vine's one-liner-thon Not Going Out, gets her own sitcom, in which she runs a joke shop - badly - and fawns over the sexy chef in the restaurant next door - badly. At first, the humour is all a bit trouser-round-the-ankles obvious but once the fabulous Sally Philips turns up as one of Miranda's toff school friends, the high levels of daffiness bludgeon us into submission.