Miranda

Sometimes, you need to make sure you have enough silliness in your life.  I don’t mean harmful silliness, like dragging the UK out of the EU because economically inactive pensioners are scared of foreigners, or panicking about a handful of migrants crossing the Channel to be absorbed into a wealthy country of 66 million people.  I mean fun silliness, like being unable to resist the urge to gallop instead of walk down long empty corridors, or pulling rude faces at your colleagues when you spot them bored in glass meeting rooms.  You can probably tell that the silliness evident in these posts is also embraced in most areas of my life.  One environment that gets more than its fair share of my own personal brand of silliness is the office.  There’s something about such a grey, grown-up, corporate environment, all furious typing and professional profile raising, that makes me want to respond with laughter.  After a feral childhood, spending adult daytimes for the last 11 years in the UV-deficient glow of computer screens could have been crushing.  But, if enough silliness happens, the subsequent belly laughs are enough to stave off the threat of submitting to being a full worker drone.  Sadly, one of my closest partners in silliness recently fled our office home after many years of laughing till we cried.  I therefore found myself with a silliness deficit in my day-to-day existence.

But there, nestling among multimillion dollar new content on Netflix was the old BBC sitcom Miranda.  I was helpless, working through all three series in no time at all.  I hereby announce a new genre of TV: comfort telly.  In my friend’s absence, and in the face of other things in life I would describe as bad (Brexit, gluten, people who sit behind me on the bus at 6.30am after smoking so many cigarettes that I am unwillingly bathed in their tobacco-riddled breath, misplaced apostrophes throughout the media industry), watching Miranda brought cheer to some dreary January evenings.

Most importantly of all, I have to stress that my friend is nothing like Miranda.  They are polar opposites.  She has a high-powered career for which she has to wear roll necks, whereas Miranda pootles about in a joke shop she set up with some inheritance.  My friend has a top-notch husband, whereas the main joke about Miranda is her disastrous love life.  While Miranda’s idea of a good meal is to catch crumbled chocolate biscuits in her mouth while using a hair dryer to blow them off the table (biscuit blizzard), my friend has promised me one of her famous weekend roasts (not a euphemism).  I could go on.  The main point is that their only common trait is their love of silliness.

We’ll go into the exact ingredients of this silliness, but we should dwell for a moment on the polarising nature of this sitcom.  Most people’s responses to my evangelising about the joys of rewatching Miranda have been wailing indignation that I could subject myself to something so unfunny.  I’m happy to be told I’ve got bad taste, but I think Miranda’s perceived unfunniness is more complex than that.  I’ll grant you that you can see some punchlines coming a mile off, but it’s that predictable payoff, with Miranda Hart’s silly charm, that can be so reassuring and comforting.  The show came about at a time when comedy was moving away from the obvious sitcom (like The Office).  Conversely, Miranda embraced the format, adding to the presence of the live studio audience by ending each episode with the cast waving at the camera and dancing before their fans like an amateur village panto.  Two words: such fun.

Right then, here’s how Miranda is silly:

She is a show off

One of our hero’s celebrated foibles is her awkwardness in social situations, but her response to sensing a faux-pas is to behave worse and worse until the awkwardness is exacerbated beyond the human ability to cringe any further.  If a throwaway sentence stumbles into a song lyric, she’ll launch into the next verse and chorus, veering between shyness and attention seeking.

She looks at the camera

Perhaps the biggest sitcom crime of all, but the one that makes me laugh the most.  The knowing glances she shares with us when her mother, Penny, is being awful, or when she is quite pleased with how she has handled something elevate a standard joke to something much more hilarious.

She enjoys how words sound

Cusp.  Thrust.  Moist.  English has a vocabulary in the hundreds of thousands, so it’s inevitable that some of those words are more fun on the tongue than others.  Miranda will pause mid-argument to enjoy the repetition of such words, always finishing with a final flourish of saying it directly to the audience via the classic look to the camera.  Cue laughter from me which I am not sorry about.

She falls over

I laugh every time because it’s silly.  It’s not big, it’s not clever, but this is my level.  I also crack a smile every time she pushes best friend, Stevie, off a stool.

She breaks wind

See previous comment about my level of humour.  It’s not so much the parp that gets me, but her surprise at having done it.

She is posh

Posh people are silly – you just have to hang around a Waitrose to realise this.  And their expectations of each other are even sillier.  Miranda might never be able to escape her boarding school days, but it makes for a pleasant stream of nonsense.

She is from Surrey

I suppose this is linked to the above, but this county really is ridiculous, and I therefore glory in any lampooning of it in popular media.  Being so close to London (making Surrey the patio of England to Kent’s garden) the million people that occupy its four-bedroom homes are often overlooked in culture, but their silliness deserves the spotlight.

But her friends are sillier

We’ve mentioned Stevie, owner of the allure, the Heather Small cut-out and very diminutive proportions.  There’s soulmate Gary, whose own stupid inability to commit to Miranda contrives to give the various series some dramatic tension, as it can’t be all about falling over and accidentally farting.  Sally Phillips gets the best lines as Tilly, the boarding school pal who peppers her passive aggression by spicing up all her words with suffix flourishes that nobody needs, declaring things tremendulant or exclaiming about major disaster and his friend, colonel cock-up, all while demanding others “bear with” when reviewing text messages or ending conversation by declaring “c’est fini.”  See, if you had someone to make eyes at now, you’d be doing it.  So much of Miranda’s silliness comes from laughing at her friends’ behaviour.

So, hello to you, Miranda Hart, and kind regards thank you caller (this is a reference to in-show dialogue, not me padding out the words).  You are a champion of the many, those of us who know our real life can’t be filtered, so we might as well embrace its silliness.  I’ve loved her ever since I saw her cameo in Nighty Night (not a euphemism again) and having her back in my life as a vegeta-pal has been just the dose of silliness I have needed.