Interview: Miranda Hart, actress and comedian

Miranda Hart has always felt like an outsider, though her ability to laugh at her own insecurities has endeared her to the nation. Now she’s playing a straight role – but can she deliver?

M IRANDA HART is only 39 years old, yet she has already taken on the status of a national treasure.Miranda, her eponymous BBC1 sitcom in which she plays a klutzy, heightened version of herself, has made her a bona fide star. She has already acquired one of the must-have accoutrements of all residents of the celebrity stratosphere: she is referred to by her first name only.

To emphasise her profile, total strangers approach her in the street to sing her praises. The actress and comedian smiles. “People come up to me and say, ‘Can I just thank you for writing my life?’ And I reply, ‘I’m glad someone else is as idiotic as I am.’”

If you are still in any doubt about Hart’s stature, just take a look at the recent Christmas TV schedules. Over the festive season, it seemed to be the law that the much-loved comedian should be on TV every single night.

Over the festive period, she appeared in The British Comedy Awards (at which she won two gongs, Best Comedy Actress and People’s Choice Award for the King or Queen of Comedy), a repeat of the Christmas special of Miranda, Michael McIntyre’s Christmas Comedy Roadshow, Bear’s Wild Weekend with Miranda, Have I Got News for You and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Not even Father Christmas appeared that often over the Yuletide period.

Critics have been queuing up to pay tribute to the comedian, who has an inherent gift for slapstick. The Financial Times, for instance, called Hart “the most original and farcically hilarious female clown since Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders”.

It would be very easy for all this praise to have gone to Hart’s head. But I’ve now met her several times, and I’m very glad to report that she remains as down to earth as ever. She once asserted that “I was never in the cool gang”, and she still feels as if she is on the outside looking in.

We are meeting in her trailer on the set of her latest project, BBC1’s Call the Midwife, an engaging Sunday-night family drama that begins tonight. It is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, a real-life midwife who worked amid conditions of extreme deprivation in the East End of London during the 1950s.

At the derelict Catholic seminary in north London, which is doubling as the clinic in the series, Hart is dressed as Chummy, the gauche but committed midwife she plays. She is teaming a starchy light blue uniform with a white nurse’s cap and sensible brown shoes. Again, this is hardly the uniform you would wear to gain entry to the cool gang.

In person, Hart possesses the effortless sense of humour of a natural-born comedian. For example, she smiles when asked if she went to a hospital to research the role. “No. I would probably have fainted.”

She goes on to joke that she insisted the vast amount of cake the midwives eat in the drama was written into her contract. And, later, she laughs about the potential perils of going on a backpacking holiday. “My rucksack might make me fall over backwards – with hilarious consequences.”

The actress still cannot credit how her fortunes have been transformed over the past couple of years. Born in Devon, where her father was a Royal Navy officer, she takes a moment to reflect on this giddy period in her life. “I still can't believe this has happened to me,” sighs the comedian, the continuing bafflement evident in her voice. “It’s literally a dream come true. I can’t believe I was on the red carpet at the Baftas. And when I won at the Royal Television Society Awards, I just ran away.

“For all that, my day-to-day life hasn’t changed at all. I suppose you want me to say I’m at parties all the time and am secretly going out with Tom Cruise, but I am afraid that is not the case. I’m still in my pyjamas at nine o’clock each night, watching ITV2 without telling anyone. No, I watched that very worthy documentary on Channel 4 last night,” while whispering to the camera, “actually it was ITV2.”

This innate sense of self-effacement lies at the centre of Hart’s popularity. Modesty is, after all, the quality we Britons prize above all others. She takes the rise out of herself before anyone else can – and that is why so many viewers have connected with her. “I am self-deprecating,” she admits, self-deprecatingly.

Hart, who read politics at the University of the West of England before studying at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts in south London, goes on to analyse why viewers relate to her fictional alter ego. “People recognise the sitcom Miranda in themselves. She has that awkwardness and that sense of always being the odd one out, which everyone feels. Even people who apparently have everything feel it. There’s always this pressure to look and act right, and we can never match up to that, however confident we seem. My sitcom is about not fitting in. If I’m home alone at the weekend watching telly, I always assume that everyone else is having the best fun of their lives.”

She continues, “There's an element of believability about the fictional Miranda, but we’re raising it to the level where people think, ‘Phew, I’ve never taken it that far.’ We like misfits because they reassure us that we’re not the only ones who feel out of place. They make us feel better about ourselves. We identify with someone who is honest enough to say, ‘I’m an idiot.’

“We’ve all done things like lying to impress or laughing at a joke we don’t get or pretending to know about politics. I’d like to think everyone has done that, because I certainly have. We've all been there and are relieved that these terrible things are happening to someone else. Everyone likes to have a friend who is in a worse position than they are because it makes them feel superior. I’m happy to be the nation’s most accident-prone friend. I’ll take a bullet for the nation.”

The sitcom boasts an infectious playfulness and childlike sense of innocence. In an era when so much comedy majors in cruelty and cynicism, such an optimistic approach strikes a chord. Hart, who has also appeared in French and Saunders and the space-station sitcom Hyperdrive, says, “I recently saw an old interview with Spike Milligan, where he said that he was bored of adulthood. At a certain age, you hit a whole mass of rules. Comedians tap into a childishness we would all like to go back to, an era before we had to obey all those rules. I think that’s a big part of the sitcom’s appeal.”

The actress, who is 6ft 1in and was a champion lacrosse player at school in Berkshire, has brilliantly parlayed her own sense of awkwardness into a winning sitcom. She has made a great success of her own failure. She muses, “I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. It used to worry me that in terms of TV I did not look like ‘the girlfriend’ or ‘the daughter’. That pushed me to write my own stuff, as I thought no one else was going to write me a lead in the sitcom. At drama school, people would say to me, ‘You’ll be fine when you’re older.’ Because I looked different, that made me feel like a freak.

“If I thought about it, it would get me down, but comedically I bounced it the other way. I brushed it off by being funny about it. For example, in the sitcom someone calls me Sir’ Because I'm so tall, that has actually happened to me. It doesn’t help me feel feminine, but it is good for my comedy.”

So what other similarities are there between the fictional and the real Mirandas? Hart replies, “Inevitably there is an overlap, but I’m pleased to say that I’m not quite as socially remedial as the sitcom Miranda is. Somebody recently said I was more poised in real life, and I couldn’t have been more delighted. However, like her, I’ve always felt slightly unusual physically and in what I’ve wanted to do with my life. I’ve exaggerated that and taken it to an extreme – that helps in comedy. I play a person who, in trying to fit in, is unable to be herself.

“Some stories in the sitcom are based on what actually happened to me. For instance, I did once get locked in the park and had to lift my jumper to get through the gate. But unlike the sitcom character, I did not get my bra stuck on the gate as the man I fancied walked past. It’s always funny to use your own life story. It’s easier and quite cathartic. I now know there is a reason why my teens and 20s were hell. It was so in my 30s I could be on the telly.”

Admirably well-balanced, Hart is not concerned about putting her own life on the screen for our amusement. She says, “I suppose some therapist might say, ‘You’re only being a clown to avoid reality’ or some such psychobabble. But in real life, I’m not constantly being a clown. However, I’m very happy to place myself up there to be laughed at because I’m inherently a big show-off. The minute I see the red light, I’m off.”

Hart had to tone down those show-off tendencies for Call the Midwife. Otherwise, though, she did not find acting in drama so far removed from comedy. “A lot of people said to me, ‘Ooo, are you doing the acting now?’ But for me it was not that different. I see myself much more as a comedy actress than a stand-up. The sitcom is heightened, but it’s not that different from straight acting. All the same, it was weird saying to the director of Call the Midwife at the end of every take, ‘That wasn’t funny, was it?’ Normally, it’s the reverse.”

She adds, “Call the Midwife is the first time I haven't needed to get laughs. In fact, I deliberately avoided them. I simply go for the truth of who I think Chummy is. Is it still a temptation to speak to the camera, as I do in the sitcom? Sometimes I think, ‘It would be fun to do a cheeky grin here,’ but I have to resist. In rehearsals, I did make the director laugh. But then she said, ‘Don’t do that in the take.’”

Hart gives a convincing performance as the devout and loyal Chummy, and is hopeful that viewers will see her in a new light. “But I’m just doing my own thing and hoping people like the show. In the end, you can’t worry about what people will think – otherwise you would never get out of bed. But I do hope people buy into Chummy and forget about the sitcom. Comedy is my first passion, but it would be amazing if I had the luck to do both comedy and drama".

Chummy was a part she was desperate to play. She recalls, “Jennifer Worth sent me the book, which was amazing. She said, ‘When I first saw you on TV, I thought of Chummy.’ When I received the script, I went straight to Chummy’s scenes – well, you would, wouldn’t you? I loved the script. I thought, ‘I really hope I get to play this brilliant, eccentric woman. I don’t want anyone else to play her.’ In terms of characters I’ve played before, there are similarities. Chummy is a fish out of water. She is plunged into a world she doesn’t fit into.”

Hart found the scenes where she had to deliver babies particularly affecting. “Yesterday I had to deliver a baby. At the beginning of the scene they used a prosthetic baby, and then towards the end they brought in a real baby, which was just five days old. It made me understand why Chummy had that calling. In the 1950s, midwives saved thousands of lives. Playing those scenes, you understand the intensity of what they went through. You also realise they had this amazing sense of duty and honour. It was much more than simply a case of, ‘Pass the forceps.’ I’ve never had children, but when you see a newborn baby, you see the beginning of life. It’s really moving,” she says. “This drama is about the human spirit, and that doesn’t really change. I hope people will relate to it because it is so universal.”

The actress emerged with a tremendous admiration for what midwives in the 1950s achieved. “People rightly saw them as saviours, and I have such respect for them. In this drama, you understand how much these midwives were revered. Up close, you realise what an ordeal childbirth can be and how a good midwife can make such a difference.

“We live in such comfort nowadays compared to what they endured in the 1950s. They were these young women cycling around the East End alone. They were called to do a job on their own, which now requires several doctors. They were heroines, angels. In fact, I think it would be very appropriate if Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’ struck up every time I came on screen, or perhaps ‘She’s the One’. That would only be for my appearances, you understand.”

Starring in Call the Midwife has not made Hart long to be a mother herself. “Did I feel broody making this drama? No, I was too in the moment and too busy thinking about the technical side. Then one baby peed on my glove and I thought, ‘No thanks.’”

Hart is a rare example of a woman who has made it in the notoriously male-dominated world of comedy. But that does not mean she wants to shoulder the burden of representing all female comics. She says, “I never feel like a standard-bearer for women in comedy. It has never worried me that there are fewer women in comedy, although I’m sure some people could write a thesis about why that is.

“Maybe I should be more interested. But I think it would be awful to be employed just because I’m a woman. I see myself as a comedian rather than a female comedian. I happen to be a woman, but I am a comedian by trade.”

As you can see, playing an insecure character has made Hart much more secure. She is a truly independent-minded spirit. She says, “I used to get that ‘Ah, bless’ from women who wanted to make themselves feel better. I think some women find me unusual in that I don’t need men to find me attractive or to play society’s games. I don’t need to follow a list of ‘Oh dear, you really should do this’.

“What I love about getting older is that you don’t have to care any more.”