Miranda's favourite pratfall

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My Day on a Plate: Miranda Hart

The comedian Miranda Hart reveals her healthy eating habits.

How to describe Miranda Hart's style of comedy? Certainly, she throws everything into it - panto, slapstick, a little social satire, bad singing, malapropisms, farting. Whatever works. Of course, the biggest thing she throws into it is herself. And if she lands on her backside, well, hey - job done! The second series of Miranda started as her fans hope it means to go on, with a taxi whipping off her party dress and roaring away with it caught in the door. Magnificent.

If this had been the Carry On team, they'd have chosen saucy little Babs Windsor to be stranded in the street in her smalls. I'm not suggesting that Miranda is more of a Hattie Jacques, but oh lordy how much funnier - and she knows it - to have a woman of size lumbering up the street in bra, big pants and unattractive tights, valiantly putting art ahead of dignity.

Do women mind that men would find that such a hoot? It seems safe to assume that Miranda's constituency is vastly female, though her overarching rom-com plot - the perennial pursuit of Gary from the local gastropub - is merely a slave to Miranda's primary purpose of making a show of herself. But what a show! Listen to that live studio audience - a pit of hyenas feeding on their own laughter. More! More!

Sometimes, it was the mock-heroic way she told 'em ("I am with much news that I shall now birth!"); sometimes, a cheeky aside to the camera did the trick, or even a simple ungainly twirl. No one cares where the laughs come from, but come they must and do. Miranda's higgledy-piggledy castle of fun is built on instinct rather than theory.

The show cloaks itself in wholesome, old-fashioned japery with its broad misunderstandings ("I said ghosts, not goats!") and knowing winks at Hi-de-Hi! and Frank Spencer, and the way Miranda's mother (Patricia Hodge) flits in and out as if through a time portal to a 1950s Whitehall farce.

But there's always a sharp sensibility at work - in Hart's gleeful observations of Miranda's post-Bridget Jones victimhood, of the girly fads and shibboleths ("Fabulasmic!") of her fatuous posh friends - and if anyone is more hilariously note-perfect at being one than Sally Phillips (who is literally a scream as the hyper-amused Tilly), I'd hate to meet them. So, yes, more.

Miranda really shouldn't work. If it were any more mired in Seventies sitcom cliches it would feature Terry Scott and June Whitfield in a shop called Grace Brothers.

It's also terribly blighted by awful canned laughter and comedy signposts probably visible from Mars. Yet, despite all this, Miranda is occasionally very funny indeed. This is mostly down to Miranda Hart's bravery. How many 6ft 1in women would write a scene in which they're running down the road in ill-fitting underwear and flesh-cloured tights?

It's Hart's heart that makes Miranda so endearing. And because she falls over a lot and is oddly reminiscent of Frankie Howerd.

The first in this second series sees her trying to get over the departure of her improbably handsome boyfriend by becoming the type of woman 'who just grabs a wheatgerm smoothie in between work and going out because that's enough to keep her going even though she went for a jog at lunchtime - and enjoyed it.' At this point mum (Patricia Hodge) pipes up: 'Darling, I'm putting on a whites wash - if your pants are dirty, pop them off and I'll pop them in.' Miranda shouldn't work but somehow it does.

Miranda is certainly an acquired taste: some critics love its charm; others find it too slapstick-happy. In the second episode of the series, the eponymous heroine is prompted to do something for a good cause when Tilly and Penny organise a charity wine-tasting event. But when volunteering at a rest home and an attempted parachute jump do not go according to plan Miranda begins to query what life is all about.

Miranda is here for those who miss 1970s slapstick and shows like Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. Miranda Hart's namesake character is a Francesca Spencer, prone to falling over, having her dress pulled off by a departing taxi, getting stuck on a sushi carousel and getting into embarrassing misunderstandings. It's kind of like the spoof "Hennimore" sitcom from That Mitchell And Webb Look, where the joke is that you know exactly what joke is coming up.

Done straight it would be terrible, but Hart's blithe honesty that it's all just a silly sitcom, complete with cast members waving bye-bye at the end, is disarming.

After bringing us up to speed on the events of the last series, she happily declares: "Right, let's jolly on with the show," and the whole thing's like a community panto, where you know the routines are all ancient but you giggle along a bit anyway, mostly because everyone involved seems to be having so much fun.

Patricia Hodge, her snooty mum, has a good catchphrase: she's always saying of some ordinary activity, "it's what I call ..." then using the same word that everyone else uses, like "a walk". It could, as I call it, "catch on".

Miranda (BBC2), back for a second series, is as gloriously daft as Accused was dour. Gary, the love interest, has gone to Hong Kong and Miranda is bent on reinvention. She will become one of those women who wear skirts and have fruit bowls that don't contain three-week-old rotting pears because "they actually eat the fruit!" After getting stuck on the local sushi bar's conveyor belt, curtseying to and farting in front of the new chef it dawns on her with the palpable sense of horrified wonder in which Hart specialises that "The new me is currently substantially worse than the old me." It is solid, heartening fare and I nearly laughed my leg off.

It's a sensation akin to being flattened by a bull in a china shop but I've finally submitted to the unlikely charms of Miranda, a comedy that veers from the inspired to the banal with such regularity it's hard to know whether you're coming or going. Or where eponymous heroine Miranda Hart ends and her fictitious alter ego begins.

It's in the moments of inspired physical lunacy - last night had her necklace hooked to a sushi restaurant travelator, which tapped into a secret fear I didn't even know I had - when such considerations fly out the window. It's funny in a deeply daft kind of way.

And then the next minute it lurches back into some ghastly variation of a 1970s sitcom where girls go all silly whenever a fit bloke pitches up.

So Miranda is conflicted and confusing. She's what I call a mixed bag. But when she's good, she's very, very good.

It's a joy to have Miranda back, offering a reminder, in this polemical age, that comedy can still be visual as well as verbal.

Miranda episode 2.1 review

You'll know if Miranda's for you after one episode. If you're not smiling when the end credits roll - preceded by the iconic "You Have Been Watching" subtitle, over a sequence where all the characters dance around together, winking and waving to the camera when their name appears -then fine, it's not your cup of tea. I'll find you squirming in your sofa, no doubt. But it cheers me up immensely, and I salute the excellent scheduling to brighten a chilly November evening.