In the debased world that is modern celebrity, it’s hard to think of a reliable barometer of fame. The primetime chat shows are gone, the celeb impressionists have been relegated to panel shows and I’m a Celebrity... Get Me out of Here! means “I’m a nobody, can I please take part?”.
Perhaps the last bastion is Comic Relief, because it only goes for the truly big names. Clowning for cash is wasted if the famous faces mean nothing to the public. So it’s safe to say, on the basis of her towering presence in this year’s show, that Miranda Hart is properly, Comic Relief famous.
The lofty comedian is all over the annual fundraiser like Spandex across the thighs of a Strictly Come Dancing team. Last night, she judged the final of Let’s Dance, applying her magisterial cogitations to performances by Russell Kane as Beyoncé, Katie Price as Freddie Mercury, Noel Fielding as Kate Bush and Ade Edmondson as a ballerina. Next week, she steps into the tights herself, writing and performing in a sketch spoofing the insane Sky1 fly-on-the-wall series Pineapple Dance Studios, where the full cast of her sitcom, Miranda, will hit the ballet barre with the boyband JLS. Although dance is clearly her theme, she also whips up a sherry trifle on Comic Relief Does Masterchef, competing against Claudia Winkleman and Ruby Wax, while the judge is currently rumoured to be the prime minister himself. Even if untrue, the rumour indicates what’s assumed to be eminently possible for a woman who was almost unknown when Cameron’s election campaign began. And her success seemed a longer shot than his.
Around episode four, they told me the viewing figures — three million. I was like, wow... that is good, right? Back in 2009, I went to a live studio recording for the first series of her sitcom, thinking I was wasting my Sunday night. On paper, this was a small-scale, offbeat comedy with a short life span. For a start, it was a live studio recording, when the form was assumed to be dead. Second, it had a female writer-star, in the year when Sharon Horgan’s Pulling lost its struggle to stay on air. And this was a semiautobiographical show about the awkwardness of a tall, overweight, boarding-school-educated woman who ran a toy shop and struggled to get a man. Who was going to identify with that? And calling the show Miranda? She had had bit parts in Smack the Pony, Absolutely Fabulous and Nighty Night, and a stint as Lee Mack’s Polish cleaner in Not Going Out, but few knew her name.
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At the recording, however, one thing was stunningly obvious. This audience was the British public in cross section: hipsters, housewives and handymen. When Miranda stepped onto the studio floor and asked how many people had been at the previous week’s show, more than half of them put their hands up and cheered. Studio audiences may respond like that for Have I Got News for You, but not for an as yet unscreened BBC2 scripted sitcom with no big names. As the show unrolled, it was clear why they had returned. Somehow, she had captured the feeling of a huge, knockabout 1970s British classic comedy such as Are You Being Served?, but with a goofy modern edge. Her blend of instant gratification, social awkwardness and knowing despair echoes, in the loosest possible way, Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Miranda always sets out to get what she wants, incompetently and sometimes insanely, and almost never achieves it. She yearns for good-looking Gary, longs to be thought of as cool, worries about her constant social gaffes, but still has the confidence to talk to the audience — her straight-to-camera monologues are the highlight of the show — and tell them their favourite game is “Where’s Miranda?” (Cut to a crowd of people and Miranda among them, clad in striped top and hat in the manner of Where’s Wally?, bouncing up and down and waving.)
She was also fearless about pratfalls. One of series two’s finest moments had her walking through a cemetery with her mother, confiding: “Oh, it was mortifying. Wish the ground could have swallowed me up.” Even though we know that she’s in a cemetery, even though she’s telegraphed the gag, her sudden collapse into an open grave is so perfectly timed, it’s impossible not to laugh.
The show screamed primetime BBC1. When we spoke after the recording, however, she wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think we’ll get a second series,” she confided. “I’m pretty sure we’ll be coming off air.” She was, of course, wrong. This year, Auntie gratefully announced that she was moving from BBC2 to BBC1 for her third series, only weeks after she had won an unprecedented three gongs at the British Comedy Awards — best new TV comedy, best actress and the People’s Choice award.
“Classic me,” she sighed, when I caught up with her a couple of weeks ago and reminded her of her pessimism. It’s almost like talking to her character — although, in real life, she seems less confident, less brash, more watchful, Where TV Miranda might say, “I’ve got muchos news”, real Miranda wouldn’t be sure the news was worth telling. She wasn’t confident enough to read her reviews. “I didn’t read any of them, but people were saying, ‘You know it’s going all right, reviews-wise.’ Then, around episode four, they told me the viewing figures — three million. I was like, wow... that is good, right? And, because I haven’t been gigging or doing any DVD signings, and because we went straight into series two after series one, it’s only doing this” — she indicates the vast north London dance studio and her pink taffeta ballet costume — “that I get time to be shocked at the Comedy Awards, or that Comic Relief asked. Me. To. Write. A. Sketch.”
She giggles. “I used to work for Comic Relief when I was a struggling actor — I was PA to the grants director in 2002. I took the minutes when Richard Curtis was in once, went up to him and said, ‘I really want to be on Comic Relief, have you got any advice?’ He was very nice and told me who to write to, and which casting director to contact.
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So it is a lovely thing to go back there as a...” She pauses. “I can’t say the c-word.” There’s a second, longer pause, then she mutters: “...clbrty. Or the other c-word, if you don’t like the show.”
It would be nice to say that the arc from Curtis’s wisdom to sitcom success was plain sailing. But 2002 also marked Hart’s 30th birthday and the end of a miserable decade for her, trudging between auditions and temp jobs. “In my twenties, I could see all these girls giggling at men’s jokes, when I wanted to be making the jokes myself,” she sighs. “I was always stooping to avoid being the tallest one in the room, and dealing with catty comments at auditions, where people think that if you’re tall and not a size 10, you can’t play a wife or a girlfriend.” Certainly, Hart stands out — physically, but also in her tone and personality. Her blood may not be blue, but she can trace her family back to the 12th century, and they have owned castles. Her father was the commanding officer of HMS Coventry during the Falklands war, when it was sunk, with 19 men killed. He survived, but it coincided with Miranda being sent off to boarding school.
“I was never bullied, and I did fit in... but I never felt I did,” she explains. “Perhaps that’s being tall, not being comfortable with men until my mid-twenties. Whatever it is, I’ve always felt uncomfortable. And the more you put that on yourself, the more uncomfortable you feel. The weird one.”
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Looking at her sitcom, it seems this crosses over into the script. Patricia Hodge plays her snootily disappointed mother, outraged that her girl spent her inheritance on a joke shop (in real life, Hart’s father is still very much alive) and desperate to find her a man, while Sally Phillips’s Tilly, an immensely annoying school chum, still uses her playground nickname — Queen Kong.
“The mother character...” She coughs nervously. “My mother’s never been disappointed in me, but there are obviously always elements there. I think she hopes people realise it’s not her. She gets rather offended if they think it is. And my school didn’t have lots of moneyed, King’s Road Tilly types, so I got lucky, as boarding schools go. But in terms of my character, I did very much start from myself.” She smiles. “Then I’d get too sad and morose and angry, so I had to find the fun side of my teenage angst.”
Somehow, she built up this fun side after graduating with a politics degree from the University of West England and opting for a postgrad drama school. It was there that she discovered both her love of dance — “I had a great top line,” she winks, like a seaside postcard — and the confusion her physique engendered in the entertainment world. “We had to do ballet — the teacher was called Betty, so we called her Betty Ballet, which I thought was hilarious...” She breaks off into a peal of Miranda laughter before bringing us back to the point. “She used to say ‘A metre apart, please, at the barre’, and, with no sense of a joke, she added, ‘And two metres apart if you are next to Miranda.’ The first time she said it, I thought ‘Oh, that was quite funny’, but every lesson she would say it again — ‘One metre apart, but, if you are next to Miranda, two metres.’”
Years in front of casting agents with similar attitudes followed. Eventually, she realised she had to take control. “I was going to have to write to give myself some parts, because I knew nobody would cast me as a lead in a sitcom and nobody would cast me as the girlfriend or the daughter,” she grins cheerfully. “I was 6ft 1in and not of televisual frame. It took me 15 years, but I did it. I started writing in 1994, made a tiny splash in Edinburgh in 2002, was spotted by Jo Sergeant — who works with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders — in 2003, and they helped me develop the show.”
Actually, now my height is a huge advantage. It makes slapstick comedy seem far more natural While working up Miranda into a radio, then a television script, she picked up roles with Jack Dee, in Lead Balloon, and French, in The Vicar of Dibley, until her breakthrough in Not Going Out. Her series-one cameo as an acupuncturist so impressed the producers, they brought her back as the clumsy cleaner Barbara for the next two seasons. Saunders, meanwhile, helped to shoo BBC bosses into the rehearsed reading of Miranda, and she stumbled on air.
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“I like stumbling, but I prefer falling,” she laughs. “Actually, now my height is a huge advantage. It makes slapstick comedy seem far more natural. Think of John Cleese towering over Manuel. If anything, the producers have had to stop me doing pratfalls every few seconds.”
Because the show involves her search for a man, I ask if she’s dating, then feel terrible about it. “It’s a rude question,” I apologise. “No, it is not a rude question at all.” A light grin plays across her lips. “It is good to remind the British public that I am still single. I am not dating. No, no, I am not. I literally went on holiday at the beginning of January, came back, and this is the first time in three years that I have really been out and about, as I have been working so hard. So how could I date?” she ends imperiously.
Her PR walks over from a hushed conversation with the photographer and interrupts. “The word is that it would be quite good to start make-up,” she explains. Hart grimaces: “They probably looked at the state of me and thought, ‘We’d better get her over there as quickly as possible.’”
As we finish up, I ask if she knows why she’s suddenly a hit. “I really don’t,” she muses. “My aim was to tap into that universal truth that we all feel awkward in life, but hide it to varying degrees. Everyone feels like a dick at some point in their life — probably every day.”
Does she think the BBC1 audience will embrace that? “I think, these days, comedy both fears BBC1 prime time and looks down on it — a lot of my peers really hated The Vicar of Dibley,” she says carefully. “I love it. I think it’s very funny, but I think there’s a sense that a cult show on BBC2 is much more cool. And it’s harder writing for BBC1. You have to have proper jokes, and jokes are really hard to write. It’s much easier being characterful and oblique on a niche channel where you don’t need laughs. That’s the difference with a studio show. You hear the audience. Gavin and Stacey has the licence to have three pages of emotion and pathos because they don’t need the laugh. In a studio, you really feel the silence.”
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All the same, she hasn’t started writing the third series. Often, I tell her, the first album or novel springs from a writer’s angst and outsider position, which propels them to fame and the Groucho Club, but when it comes to writing again, people can be crippled by the success. Hart considers this for a second, then shrugs. “That shouldn’t be a problem,” she says as she settles into the make-up chair. “Because I don’t think I’m a success.” It’s just everyone else who knows she is.
Comic Relief: Funny for Money on Red Nose Day, Friday, 7pm, BBC1