Miranda Hart: Joyce Greenfell, with even more pratfalling
Miranda Hart has done her knee in. ‘I’m receiving visitors in a horizontal manner,’ she says, reclining on an L-shaped chaise-longue.
Hart’s delivery of the line will be familiar to the millions who turned her self-titled comedy series into BBC Two’s sleeper hit of last autumn; the artless, jolly-good-show inflections of her idol Joyce Grenfell, undercut by a fruity ooh-matron ripeness that pulls up just short of impudence. The caveat is important – unworldliness is an important part of Miranda the character and the person’s appeal.
‘I’m a late developer in all kinds of ways,’ the 6ft 1in comedian merrily acknowledges. ‘I’m 37 and I’m sometimes hideously embarrassed at social occasions for being so ill-informed, especially because a lot of comedians are clever people. It’s a bit tricky to go on Have I Got News For You when you haven’t read a newspaper in 20 years.’ She pauses. ‘But I’m pleased about it, too, in many ways; it means I’ve been able to hold on to a kind of innocence.’
Her fans might be surprised to learn that Hart’s injury was occasioned by nothing more onerous than bending over to tie a shoelace during the filming of her sitcom’s second series. This, after all, is the woman who’s embraced the comic pratfall with more gusto than anyone since Ab Fab’s Patsy and Eddie, and, going further back, to Eric Morecambe, another of her comedy heroes.
‘People are always like: “Gosh, you really are tall” when they meet me,’ she says. ‘So I just thought, OK, I’ll use the tools at my disposal. It worked for John Cleese…’
And Naomi Campbell, I offer. ‘Yes, I’m like Naomi in so many ways,’ she beams. ‘I’ve watched her falling off her Westwood platforms thousands of times for inspiration. I guess I didn’t realise how awkward I felt about being tall until I started playing on it. And then I found that pratfalling comes very naturally to me.’
Miranda the show is an unabashed paean to the joys of light entertainment; you’d be watching it for a long time before the word ‘edgy’ sprang to mind, and that’s just how its creator likes it. ‘I knew, before the first series went out, that the phrase “old-fashioned” would be levelled at me,’ she says, arching an eyebrow. ‘But I regard that as a positive rather than a negative. I think Julia Davis and Sharon Horgan are brilliant, but I couldn’t write a Nighty Night or a Pulling if I tried, and I doubt whether they could do what I do. It wasn’t planned to put the series out at 8.30 originally, but I found that I loved that pre-watershed slot.
‘So much so, that for the second series I decided to put no profanity in whatsoever. There’s not even an “Oh my God” in this one. The mainstream’s where I’m at,’ she concludes, with some satisfaction. She sips her tea. ‘For me, making it funny comes first. I’m not pushing any kind of message.’
True to her word, Hart led from the front in the first series of her sitcom, as an outsize character doing outsize things: running a shop with her compact, controlling best friend, played by Sarah Hadland (it’s a measure of the show’s opacity when it comes to anything approaching real life that, having watched it repeatedly, I still had no idea what the shop sold; even Hart herself is somewhat confused, offering ‘jokes and novelties’ as a best shot); being royally patronised by her imperious mother (Patricia Hodge) for her chronically husbandless status; and prostrating herself before her braying old schoolfriends (Sally Phillips and Katy Wix).
Lastly, in what would be a textbook case of Unresolved Sexual Tension if you could make the quantum leap of imagining the heroine indulging in anything so post-watershed, being serenely oblivious to the faltering advances of a local chef (Tom Ellis, whose character was set to depart for Hong Kong at the end of the last series, in what Hart describes as ‘our attempt at a Crossroads-type cliffhanger’).
It’s a world whose internal logic means that going on holiday to a hotel down the road and being mistaken for a motivational speaker, or pretending to be a lesbian and holding a Jane Austen ‘coming out’ costume party in order to escape an oleaginous suitor, seem perfectly explicable activities. The suspicion that it takes formidable graft to produce something this breezy is confirmed when I ask Hart how the new series is progressing.
‘I’m probably not the person to ask,’ she replies, her eyes narrowing. ‘I’m in a bit of a blind panic about it. I keep asking myself: is it funny? Is it as good as the first one? I’ve got real Second Album Syndrome with it.’
Given the recent vogue for ‘sim-coms’ and ‘mock-docs’, where stars play slightly abstracted versions of their own personas, some have wondered how close Hart’s sitcom world is to her own. Well, she says, she’s ungainly and unworldly, as we’ve already gleaned. And yes, her own mother, like her screen version, says ‘such fun’ a lot, but she’s nowhere near as eccentric.
‘Plus, she’d never try to marry me off or be hideously embarrassed by me,’ she adds emphatically, though Hart is, like Miranda, single. ‘I’ve been single for three years,’ she says, ‘and for the first time this year I’ve found myself thinking it would be quite nice to have a relationship again. But work’s kind of taken over recently. Plus, I’d want a taller man and that’s, well, a tall order. You can look at Sophie Dahl and Jamie Cullum and say they’ve broken the mould, and it’s heightist to say it looks odd, but, well – I think it looks odd.’
Hart was born to what she calls ‘resolutely middle-class stock’ in Petersfield, Hampshire. She remembers the first time she realised she could make other people laugh: ‘I did an impression of my primary school headmaster for my mum and sister, and they just got hysterical.’
She was sent to public school at Downe House in Berkshire aged 11, when her father, a Naval man, was posted to the United States. She honed her comic skills there while enduring her growth spurts – ‘I reached my full height by the sixth-form,’ she says, ‘but I was also very very thin, and people used to laugh at the gangliness rather than the precipitousness’ – and went on to do politics at Bristol University. ‘I got a 2:1 pretty much by winging it with what amounted to a photographic memory,’ she says.
This facility helped her get work as a PA while making her first forays onto the comedy circuit. Then, in her twenties, she developed agoraphobia and spent months on antidepressants. ‘It runs in the family and I see it as a hereditary form of chemical imbalance, bad luck-bad wiring,’ Hart shrugs. ‘I’ve been there and done that – I’m not a Stephen Fry, it’s not going to be with me forever, though I’ll always be a fairly anxious person. I have a good old cry at bad news and get rather down. Pessimism is my default setting.’
This hiatus contributed to Hart’s late-developer status; she didn’t start acting till her mid-twenties and finally ditched the temping in 2005, when she got a role in the cultish sci-fi comedy Hyperdrive. Soon, Lee Mack had written a part for her in Not Going Out; Jennifer Saunders, surely spotting a kindred comic spirit, wrote her into Ab Fab and was there when Hart pitched Miranda to the BBC.
‘However much I think I’m rubbish and it’ll all stop tomorrow, I’ve always had just about enough oestrogen carry on, to say, hang on, I’m funny, I really am,’ she grins. ‘And the minute I hear the first laugh, I’m off.’
We’re talking in Hart’s west London house and one question – what does it say about her? – seems easy enough to answer: she values her family (multiple photos of whom are on display), friends (who keep calling to check on her injury) and enjoys defiantly lowbrow evenings in (evidenced by her DVD boxed-sets, not of The Sopranos or The Wire, but of Mistresses and Pineapple Dance Studios).
‘It’s a pretty good time for me,’ she confirms. ‘I feel like I’ve done life in reverse. Everyone else seems to had an amazing twenties and thirties, partying and doing X, Y and Z, and I’ve done the opposite; I’m really looking forward to getting older, being healthier, happier, starting to really live.’
In the meantime, however, Hart hobbles off to get another cuppa.
The new series of ‘Miranda’ begins in November on BBC Two
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Joanne Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine: Mike Leigh with poo jokes
‘We’re used to people saying: “Sorry, the commissioning editor’s terribly busy”, or “We really like it, but…”, and now people are saying: “What do you want to write?”’ marvels Vicki Pepperdine.
‘It’s a strange shift,’ nods Joanna Scanlan. ‘We can’t quite get used to it.’
The writing/acting duo’s elevated circumstances are all thanks to Getting On, the mordantly surreal comedy set on a general NHS ward which they co-wrote with Jo Brand, and which stars the overburdened Scanlon and sardonic Brand as nurses, with Pepperdine as a thrusting, imperious doctor.
The first series may have consisted of a paltry three episodes, but it rose up through the schedules like a stealth bomber, debuting on BBC Four before being repeated on BBC Two, despite – or possibly because of – its Office-like vérité camerawork and grimly acidic farce.
The pair have contrasting comic roots. Scanlan, thoughtful and analytical, was a lecturer in drama and didn’t start acting until she was 35, and while her best-known role is probably the long-suffering Terri in The Thick Of It, she says she’s not inspired by comedy as such: ‘At home, my husband watches the sitcoms, while I watch documentaries.’ Pepperdine, effusive and wry, had a comic Radio 4 double act with Melanie Hudson.
What both share is a Mike Leigh-style dedication to character immersion and improvisation. ‘Real life interests me,’ Scanlan says, ‘so when we were thinking about Getting On, we wanted an absolute sense of the authentic experience of working on a ward like that, with the angle just shifted slightly to bring out all the inherent absurdities.’
The pair came together with Jo Brand five years ago with the aim of writing ‘something’ – with Brand’s background as a psychiatric nurse, a medical sitcom was the idea that resonated. The show is script-edited and directed by The Thick Of It’s Peter Capaldi, but The Office is the show it is most often compared to, both in look and downbeat, bittersweet feel.
‘We found the world of medicine incredibly funny, as outsiders,’ Scanlan says. ‘One of the first things we discovered during our research was the Bristol Stool Chart, which enumerates the nine different kinds of poo.’
‘Nine,’ Pepperdine repeats incredulously.
‘And the biggest compliment we got,’ Scanlan continues, ‘was that a lot of health professionals told us it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.’
They weren’t alone in their approbation – the trio were nominated for a Royal Television Society Award for their scripts last year, and Brand and Scanlan were nominated for the Best Comedy Actress Bafta this year. The second series – a full-deck six-episoder – is finished and sees them further developing the characters’ travails – hopeless inter-ward love affairs, clueless bureaucratic squabbling.
Scanlan and Pepperdine are also developing a BBC series set in the world of competitive dog shows and have other writing projects in the pipeline.
If nothing else, their experiences with Getting On means they now have solid career fallbacks. ‘I could easily go and be a bogus NHS person,’ Scanlan says. ‘I know all the drugs and all the lingo.’
‘I think you could cure people,’ contends Pepperdine. She’s not joking.
The new series of ‘Getting On’ is on BBC Four
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Josie Long: the most enthusiastic stand-up you’ll ever meet
It’s a cold, depressing day in October and Josie Long is on the road, touring her latest show, Be Honourable! On the way from a gig in Swindon to another in Trowbridge she’s decided to find a river and – remember: October, cold, depressing – go swimming in it.
‘It’s going to be excellent!’ she says. It’s going to be freezing, I say. ‘But in a good way,’ she insists. ‘It makes you feel like you're burning all over, but in a really good way. It’s so refreshing, isn’t it? You feel really hardy!’
This is the essence of Josie Long, one of life’s great enthusiasts. She’s the sort of person whose heart bursts at the sight of a library. She delights in drawing and making things, in learning, really. That’s why she read English at Oxford, but it’s also why stand-up has been her vocation for more than a decade (she won the BBC New Comedy Award when she was 17; she’s now 28).
‘I find it just such a brilliant way of expressing yourself,’ she says. ‘It’s so direct and you can use all your own ideas exactly how you want them. I like the fact that often it does just feel like study, it does have that element of going off and learning.’ Her romantic, eccentric, fundamentally kind-hearted sensibility has made her perhaps the most successful stand-up of her generation.
When she was 11 or 12 years old, Long loomed over her peers. Literally. ‘I was really massive, really tall and big,’ she says, ‘and I think I wanted to deflect attention from that and try to make myself a bit less of a target.’ She performed in comic plays and did sketches in her school assemblies.
Then, in her early teens, she started doing stand-up, inspired by her childhood heroes, Vic and Bob. ‘None of it made any sense,’ she says. ‘I think the first routine that I wrote was about my parents selling off my stomach as allotments to people. It wasn’t wonderful stuff, I’m not going to lie to you!’
Be Honourable!, her current show, is less wholly light-hearted than her other work. ‘The last couple of years,’ she says, ‘I’ve felt increasingly politicised and I had this big wake-up that I believe a lot of things but I’m not acting on them. I thought because I was nice, that was good enough. Now, with a government that I ideologically oppose, that has to inform what I’m doing, I’m having to write about how much I feel desperately sad.’
A book is one of Long’s next big projects – ‘It’s in the conceptual stage at the moment…what that means is that I’m so heavily procrastinating, you have no idea’ – but stand-up will always be her great passion. ‘There have been times when I've felt a bit like people who get married when they’re 16, and when they’re 50 they’re like: “I can’t leave, I’ve got nothing else!” But it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was 11. I’m devoted to it.’
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Lady Garden: the comedy troupe with the world’s best name
Lady Garden, a sextet of giddy girls who met at Manchester University in 2005, were one of the most hyped acts in Edinburgh this year. Eleanor Thom is the closest the sketch troupe gets to a Svengali: she saw the other girls (Camille Ucan, Jessica Knappett, Hannah Dodd, Beattie Edmondson and Rose Johnson) on stage here and there in Manchester, and invited them to join forces. She was also the one who gave them their memorable – or as some reviewers have argued, ‘terrible’ – name, whittled down from a 10-page-long list that included gems such as Granny Left The Iron On.
Today the six are scattered around the country, so every month or so they arrange to meet for what they call ‘retreats’ – graciously hosted by their various parents – where they lock themselves away and write.
‘A lot of the time,’ Johnson says, ‘sketches come out of us messing around, our little idiosyncrasies as people and our relationships with each other.’ ‘We do have to leave an hour at the beginning of each rehearsal for chatting,’ Edmondson says, ‘but that’s how you find funny things. The pros and cons of chatting…’ ‘It’s just such fun,’ Thom adds, ‘six girls in a room, laughing about things they’ve seen.’
‘And,’ Johnson says ‘it’s tried and tested in front of at least five other people. So there’s a chance you’ll like some of it.’
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Emma and Beth Kilcoyne: Sunderland’s wittiest twins
There’s a line written by Paul McCartney that’s very dear to Emma and Beth Kilcoyne. It goes something like this: ‘Go and see these girls – they’re dead funny.’ That line, printed on the posters of the sisters’ third Edinburgh show, helped to bring them to the attention of agents and commissioners. It marked the start of their career in television, which recently culminated in their writing the comedy drama Roger and Val Have Just Got In for Dawn French.
French got to know about the Kilcoynes when she saw their brilliant, grotesque BBC Three comedy, Dogtown, which lasted for only one series. ‘It was very much a first show,’ says Beth, ‘but, crucially, Dawn saw it and liked it and called us into a meeting and said: “Would you like to write something for me?”’
Emma and Beth Kilcoyne were brought up in Sunderland. They are both 37. They are twins, which they agree, is a great advantage. When Beth was a member of the Cambridge Footlights she performed, but didn’t dare write. ‘If you’re going to write comedy,’ she says, ‘you’re going to say terrible lines or have some dreadful ideas, and if you’re writing with someone who knows you as well as a sibling does, all the inhibitions you’d normally experience aren’t there.’
Despite their twindom, they offer different comic elements. In one episode of Roger and Val, Beth says she came up with a symbolic comparison between a mountaineer and a tightrope walker. Emma, on the other hand, came up with a bit about a Fray Bentos pie. ‘I will never, ever give up going on the bus or listening as hard as I can at a checkout,’ Emma says. ‘The stories you pick up and that way that people tell them, it’s the most stimulating and helpful thing.’
While they wait to hear whether the BBC is going to recommission Roger and Val (the signs are good) they ponder future projects. ‘I want to write about funny people, including women,’ Beth says. ‘To me middle-aged women are great heroines.’
They share territory with their formative influences Alan Bennett and Mike Leigh – partly comic, partly tragic, with a commitment to an understated realism. ‘We like to write about people who don’t necessarily have the option to drop out and be trendy,’ Emma says, ‘People like us, you know?’
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