|
Miranda
How Garry Shandling inspired Miranda
One of the few recent laugh-out-loud sitcoms, Miranda showed a comedic shift away from the neo-naturalism of The Office and The Thick Of It
guardian.co.uk
12th March 2010
It is reassuring to know that television comedy can still spring surprises. Standup comedian Miranda Hart looked destined to be a perpetual sitcom bridesmaid, having had a bit part in Not Going Out and a bigger role in shortlived sci-fi homage Hyperdrive. Then last autumn she struck gold with the self-penned Miranda, in which she brilliantly played a singleton looking for love, dealing with goofy friends and regularly falling over. What made Miranda so memorable, apart from the sublime slapstick tumbles, was the way she constantly acknowledged the viewer, shamelessly mugging to the screen.
For Hart, these exasperated expressions were throwbacks to Frankie Howerd offering the lens one of his distressed camel looks, but it made me think of another long-lost studio audience sitcom starring a standup playing a character with their own name. The last series to deconstruct and subvert the format so exquisitely was It's Garry Shandling's Show, the American hit which aired on BBC2 from 1987 to 1990. IGSS starred bouffant-haired Garry Shandling as an angsty, vain comedian called Garry Shandling grappling with his messy love life and goofy friends, while constantly commenting on the action.
Others have tried this trick. US standup Kelly Monteith deconstructed the narrative in his eponymous BBC show from 1979 to 1984. But IGSS did not just break the fourth wall, it obliterated it. One could constantly see the crew (presumably being filmed by another unseen crew). Other actors often referred to the fact that they were in a sitcom – the Philip Seymour Hoffman lookalike playing the manager of the condo kept turning up at Shandling's door just so he could appear in a sitcom – and Shandling drove from set to set in a golf buggy. In one episode he memorably invited the audience into his living room while he was filming next door – a furore ensued when he claimed someone had stolen some loose change.
Looking back at those episodes, finally released on DVD, the high hair, tight trousers and references to Vanna White might date it, but the knowing confidence of the writing – mainly by Shandling and Alan Zweibel – shines through. The series, originally made for the nascent network Showtime, was picked up by Fox and cemented Shandling's reputation. He went on to make the formidable showbiz-skewering The Larry Sanders Show and was last seen over here being interviewed by Ricky Gervais in a very odd is-it-real-or-set-up? C4 documentary.
The playful postmodernism of IGSS lived on in Sean Hughes' 90s C4 sitcom Sean's Show. And Shandling's awkward narcissism paved the way for Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But the shift to the neo-naturalism of The Office and The Thick Of It suggested that the style had fallen out of favour among homegrown broadcasters. The success of Miranda – one of the few recent sitcoms that is truly laugh-out-loud funny – demonstrates that whether one describes it as mugging to the camera like a demented vaudevillian or gets all structuralist and calls it the apotheosis of self-referential po-mo dislocation, pulling a face onscreen will always be a hit.
Miranda Hart – TV's queen of uncool
Critics may have branded her sitcom amateurish and old-fashioned, but Miranda Hart has become a comedy hero
Kira Cochrane
The Guardian,
2 December 2010
Miranda: the sitcom you love or loathe
In the 1980s, as the alternative comedy scene blossomed in basement clubs all over Britain, Miranda Hart was holed up on a hill, in a pine forest, at an all-girls' boarding school in Berkshire, watching and re-watching her videos of Morecambe and Wise. She loved the campness and eccentricity of Eric Morecambe, and the style and wit of the other comedy legends she had grown up with: Tony Hancock, Joyce Grenfell, Tommy Cooper. When it came to sitcoms, her favourites included Are You Being Served? and Fawlty Towers – emerging from her boarding-school bubble in the early 1990s, she found new sitcoms speaking that same silly, slapstick language. "There was Ab Fab and Gimme Gimme Gimme," says Hart, in her cluttered office at BBC Television Centre, "and so I remained in this buffoony, clowny era, and just thought nothing had changed. Alternative comedy passed me by. I was like: 'Who is Alexei Sayle?'"
The fruit of that comic education has recently attracted rapturous enthusiasm; Hart has emerged, aged 37, as a comedy hero with her eponymous sitcom, Miranda. Women particularly love her – every woman I have told about this interview has almost swooned, before wondering aloud how much Hart resembles the character she plays. I wonder too, and in the early minutes of our interview it seems simple. Hart is warm, friendly, quietly funny – like a much lower key, much more grown-up version of her screen persona. But as the interview continues, a different, darker picture starts forming.
Miranda is now halfway through its second series and Hart says that, having once had people sidle up to her on the street and announce it as their guilty pleasure, "It now feels like people are allowed to openly like an uncool show." The series is a reminder of an earlier, gentler age, a time when a sitcom wasn't a sitcom unless its cast waved daffily, unselfconsciously to the audience over the closing credits, as hers does. "I just thought, that's the kind of comedy I love, so why not embrace the genre wholly and go, guys, this is what I'm doing, and you really will have to like it or lump it."
The strapline of the series is "Miranda can't fit in", and Hart plays an awkward, 6ft 1in woman who has blown her inheritance on a joke shop, which she runs with her diminutive friend, Stevie. Miranda is single – as Hart is in real life – and her mother, played with fruity, farcical mania by Patricia Hodge, is desperate to find her a man (in the very first episode, she suggests Miranda should marry her cousin because: "This is Surrey. No one minds"). Miranda is also tormented by her old boarding-school friends, who call her not just Queen Kong, but "The Empress of Kong". So far, so single girl as saddo.
Yet Hart's performance takes the show into different, delirious territory. Her style has been compared to the Two Ronnies, Frankie Howerd and Morecambe – all raised eyebrows and knowing glances to camera, pratfalls and puns, double entendres, off-tune singing at inopportune moments. She segues into Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word at a funeral, for instance, while giving an impromptu eulogy for a dead relative whose identity she is not entirely sure of. Then she falls headlong into an open grave.
In fact, Miranda falls over a lot. She is constantly trying to sweep out of rooms – and inevitably tumbling into a coat rack. Does she find the slapstick difficult? "Not at all! I love it. Usually you have a crash mat, but when you're doing a little faint or tripping over the boxes in the shop, you just have to go for it." I ask why she thinks women enjoy the show so much, and she ums and ahs, before deciding it is like "having a friend who does things you fear you might do, or have done". It's true. Her comic creation is a knowing, uproarious embodiment of women's everyday neuroses: the fear of skirts tucked in knickers, of inappropriate drunken exchanges, those social failures that make your shoulders hunch, eyes smart, just remembering them.
It is also a world away from all the competitive, male-dominated comedy on TV right now – panel shows such as QI, and particularly Mock the Week. "I think there are different kinds of comedians," says Hart, "and I prefer the clowns who are going: 'I'm an idiot, aren't we all a bit like this, laugh at me.' Whereas a lot of other comedians are saying: 'Aren't I clever? You want to be me, aren't I cool? Revere me.' Which is fine. But that's not my bag."
While the character is awkward, she is made admirable, even heroic, by her essential happiness. Miranda is one of the few single women in pop culture ever to truly enjoy their own company, constantly breaking into song while alone in her flat, or drawing faces on items of fruit. And in the series, that happiness seems to make her irresistible to men. The object of her desire, sexy chef Gary, is clearly attracted to her too, and the most recent episode saw three men fighting over her (albeit one with the not entirely flattering gambit: "Sometimes a man needs a meat feast.")
As writer and creator, Hart commands the show, and often gives notes to the cast under a persona she's taken to calling "Anal McPartlin". I'd expected her to be hugely confident – how else could she do scenes that involve her wrap dress getting stuck in a taxi door and ripped off to reveal big pants and bra? But Hart actually takes self- deprecation to a whole new level, and genuinely doesn't seem to understand that people love her show, and find her attractive. I tell her she was named Crush of the Week in one newspaper and she says: "Shut up! That's very worrying. But I can guess what they would say – something like, not the obvious choice, not the conventional choice, but for some reason Crush of the Week."
We talk about how women spend so much time in their 20s thinking of themselves as hideous, and she says: "It's such a waste of energy, I know. And I still do it now. I'm an idiot." You don't! I say. "I do, yeah. I've got to get over it."
Does she enjoy her height? "Sort of yes and no, I suppose. I'd like to be 5ft 10in. That would be very nice, because then you can wear a heel and not look like a transvestite." She pauses. "I hate talking about my height, because I don't feel like a tall person . . . 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." One of the few situations in the show that comes directly from life, she says, is being called Sir in shops and restaurants. "That happens a lot, because of being tall, and having short hair."
I had imagined her comedy came from a simple desire to "fun it up", as her character says, and when we first talk about what inspires her, this seems about right. "I think if I was to psychobabble myself, I would say it's probably just – indeed, for comedians full stop – a desire to stay in a childlike state. It's just the boredom of adulthood." But later, her explanation changes. She says that some of her comedy has "definitely come from dark times. That feeling of generally not quite being at one with the world, of not fitting in."
Hart grew up in Petersfield, Hampshire, with her younger sister, her father, a naval captain, and her mother – who is apparently nothing like the Hodge character. "My mum gets upset if people think it's her, because it's really not. The only thing that's the same is that she does say 'such fun', but then so do I, and so do a lot of people." ("I don't know what I'm going to buy for such an ugly baby," says Hodge in the series. "Your father's suggested a balaclava. Such fun!")
Hart always knew she wanted to be a comedian, but was too shy to tell anyone. At 11, her parents went off to the US for three years, and she went to the boarding school, Downe House, which she loved. The future TV presenter Clare Balding was the head girl, and while Hart was never in a gang – "I flitted between gangs, it was a deliberate choice" – she was always popular. "If you were good at sport, then you were popular, and I was very good at lacrosse, if I say so myself," she gives the head bob and mock-arrogant smirk that crops up so often in the show. "I played for Berkshire. I'm a lean, sporty woman trapped in a fat body."
It was on leaving school that she ran into problems. She had applied to do stage management courses, but felt under pressure to study politics at Bristol instead, and found the experience a culture shock. "I think, for a shy person – and I was very shy until my mid-20s – having been to an all-girls' school is not brilliant on the boyfriend front later. Because when I went to university, it was definitely like meeting a new species of people. Suddenly, at age 19, I was thinking: can you speak to these people? I was very, very nervous.
"I was very worried about not being attractive to men," she continues, "of not feeling like your stereotypical girl. Looking back, I was God knows how many stones lighter, and a couple of friends have since said: 'You know, I thought you were really, really sexy, and I would have,'" she trails off, apparently not able to form the words "made a play for you" or whatever else she was thinking. "I was like, 'no way!' when they told me. It's just that it took me a lot longer to feel comfortable in my body, and in myself, than others."
In her early 20s, she returned to live with her parents and experienced what she now calls a "blip". She suffered from agoraphobia and anxiety – she had panic attacks when she went on public transport – and the anti-depressants she took led her to put on five stone. "I won't bore you with it," she says, "because it wasn't very nice, but I think I'll always be a slightly anxious person. It's just bad genes, bad luck, really. I'll always have to force myself to see the positive, because I'm wired badly, I'd say. I'm just naturally a bit under, a bit depressed."
It was while working as a PA in the charity sector, aged 26, that she finally braved telling her parents that she wanted to be a comedian. "They weren't discouraging," she says, "but they weren't fully encouraging – which they are now – and that helped in a way. They just said, why don't you stick with being a PA, you're good at it, and that made me, in a teenage way go," she gives a loose two-fingered salute, "you just wait then, I'll try and prove you all wrong."
What followed were years of taking shows to the Edinburgh festival, trawling the comedy circuit, getting a break with a part in an Alpen ad, another with some sketches on Smack the Pony, and then a lead on a sitcom with Nick Frost called Hyperdrive. In 2005 she gave up temping, and around the same time Jennifer Saunders rocked with laughter through an early reading of a script for Miranda. That went on to become the Radio 2 show, Miranda Hart's Joke Shop, before finally moving to television.
Hart is one of friendliest people I've ever interviewed – instantly engaged and engaging – but she's so hard on herself it makes me wince. She talks about some of the male actors cast opposite her on screen, and says that "someone might say to me – so, you've got the confidence to think that Michael Landes and Tom Ellis would go after you, and I go, no, that's not how I see it. I just think: what do people want this character to find? They want her to win, and it's also funny. And sometimes you do see that, a confident man going – Oh, she's quite interesting, I've not had one of those before, I might try it, that'll be an interesting notch . . ."
It's when she talks about what she might do next – both personally and professionally – that she really lights up, that the opportunities ahead seem to hit her. She's been single for three years now, and says that while she's happy, "I'm getting to the point when I'd like a bit of affirmation, or someone to chat to, or go on holiday with." In terms of work, she'd "love to be in a play in the West End, to write my own farce. I'd like to be in a period drama, be in Downton Abbey, do a standup show. Loads!" She pauses. "I'd love to do more acting, where I'm not playing me. That would be lovely." I hope she gets exactly what she wants. Women want Miranda to win – both on screen, and off.
|
