Miranda

Radio Times review

I bet girls of all ages - little 'uns and young teens - love Miranda, and not just because its heroine, played by writer/actor/comic Miranda Hart, is so readily identifiable as a socially inept, galumphing owner of a joke shop whose lack of guile leads her into frequently cringe-making situations.

There's something innocent about Miranda, despite a handful of risque jokes. There was a running gag in the first episode about a consignment of chocolate penises, which some male comics would have killed stone dead with either smut or depravity. Yet in Miranda it was just silly and you'd have to be a Trollopian cleric to take offence.

The comedy in Miranda is old-fashioned, with a classic studio sitcom set up. Hart, making a virtue of her above-average height, throws herself into physical comedy.

I bet kids loved the bit in the first episode where she was on the dancefloor with her handsome crush and her skirt fell down, or when she fell over piles of boxes for no reason other than her awkwardness. Insecure girls, too, probably adore Miranda's refusal to be cowed by her prettier, more popular friends, a pair of screeching materialist harridans pixilated by thoughts of marriage and wedding dresses.

Television is engaged in a constant quest to find a family sitcom that, in theory, everyone can cosily sit down to watch without having to stop up granny's or the kids' ears with cotton wool during the mucky bits.

Somebody probably thinks that Big Top fits the bill perfectly, but they're wrong. In the case of Big Top "family friendly" means "not funny" and it's peppered with gags that are inappropriate for a family audience. But maybe in Miranda telly has found what it's long been looking for.

Miranda: you are awful, but I like you

It's an old-fashioned sitcom starring a desperate 30-something woman. But I can't stop laughing at Miranda.

Miranda goes to the gym

Miranda introduces episode three, and admits that some of the gym stunts she has done before in real life.

Miranda Hart, as brilliant in the second episode as in the first, blames boarding school for her farcical combination of frustrated randiness and Blyton-like inhibition. In a series of inspired clownings, she manages both to retain and repel the object of her lustful heart, chef Gary.

We quite enjoyed this sitcom about unhappily single 30-something M Hart last week. The mugging to camera is not to all tastes though.

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.