Interview: Sarah Hadland, actress

According to Sarah Hadland, when people first meet her they get an overwhelming urge to push her over. At 5ft 1in (“and a half, don’t forget the half, that’s very important to me”) with a tiny frame, it doesn’t look like she could offer much resistance. “I explain to them,” says the 40-year-old actress slowly, “that they can’t do it. Because that would be assault.”

There’s a reason that strangers find Hadland so temptingly toppleable. She plays Stevie Sutton in the hit BBC1 comedy Miranda, and one of the show’s many running gags involves the 6ft 1in Miranda pushing over her eccentric friend whenever she’s had enough of her. Stevie goes down like a kite in a windless sky and fans of the show just can’t get enough of it.

Miranda, which first aired in 2009, was a surprise hit, making the shift from BBC2 to BBC1 between series two and three. Following the life of the awkward, oversized Miranda Hart, it’s got a wonderfully good-clean-fun-meets-old-fashioned-slapstick feel to it, which seems to have struck a chord with viewers.

Stevie, a blonde, batty ball of energy, is Miranda’s childhood friend, the manager of her shop and an obsessive fan of Heather Small, she of Nineties pop group M People. Indeed another running gag involves her donning a Heather Small mask and belting out the lyric, “What have you done today to make you feel proud?” Strange, yes, but that line alone now has a cult following.

“I’ve had a few home-made Heather masks sent to me, which is quite sweet,” she says with a laugh. “People ask me to do it, to sing it down the phone to their friends.”

Sarah Hadland is one of those actors who worked solidly in show business for two decades before fame came knocking. She doesn’t come from a starry background, but her mother was a very talented child ballerina. Hadland showed an interest in dancing and her mother was quietly supportive, but insisted that she do everything herself: “She said ‘fine, if that’s what you want to do but you have to organise it all’. And it was the right thing because you have to have this incredible drive to do it.”

She left home at 16 to go to London to further her career in dance but, after a few years working in musical theatre, crossed over into acting in her early twenties.

“I desperately wanted to get into acting but I couldn’t afford to go back to drama school,” she says. “I had a lot of experience of performing but it was this confidence thing. I’d go to auditions and there would be all these girls who had been to RADA and I’d think ‘how ridiculous, of course I’m never going to get on as an actress.’ And of course people could be very snobby. They’d go ‘Oh you’re a dancer, well I hope you can string a sentence together…’ It’s funny because dancing is the toughest gig of all. It’s brutal, you’re incredibly disciplined and used to hard graft, but you come into acting and realise you’re going to have to prove yourself three times over to get your foot in the door.”

Determined and ambitious, she quickly started swotting up on plays, so she understood what everyone around her was talking about when she went to auditions. She watched other actors intently to learn from them, and gradually began to land small television roles.

“It was all serious, though, no comedy,” she says. “Stuff like The Bill. I was always playing a sobbing mother with a baby or something and then it all changed really. I made a little improvised comedy sketch with some friends, put it on a show reel and sent it to my current agent. So in the middle of this awful show reel with bits of me on The Bill and Casualty doing a lot of very bad “You can’t take my baby!” acting, my agent said ‘What’s this little comedy thing?’ And on the strength of that clip she took me on.”

Fans of Hadland’s work might say she was born to do comedy. She knew herself, from a young age, that she wanted to forge a career out of making people laugh, but she just didn’t know how to go about it. One of her earliest memories involves entertaining her family.

Aged three she put on her older sister’s enormous purple dungarees and clowned around in them singing an Elvis song. “I remember my mum, dad and sister laughing,” she says. “I remember not quite being sure why they were all laughing, but loving the feeling. And from then on I became aware that laughter can defuse situations.”

Miranda follows in the great British tradition of very self-deprecating situation comedy, but what makes it particularly interesting is that it’s a very funny show centred around very funny women. Alongside Hadland as Stevie and Miranda Hart as, um, Miranda Hart, Sally Phillips plays Miranda’s plummy-voiced boarding school friend, while Patricia Hodge is her overbearing mother. There are strong male characters certainly (Tom Ellis is wonderful as Miranda’s crush) but the fun is all focused on the women.

“Tom is brilliant and he’s much more than the totty, the crumpet,” she says before pausing and affecting Stevie’s high octane giggle. “Hold on, why am I using really old-fashioned sexist terms like ‘totty’ and ‘crumpet’? I’m so sorry. I sound like some old Jim Davidson type.”

She laughs a lot and so do I. Hadland’s adept at injecting humour into a conversation, indeed into any situation (see the purple dungarees incident circa 1974) and she’s rather proud of that. She’s not too modest to admit that she’s very funny, and indeed she raves about the fact that Miranda is a hugely popular show driven by women (Miranda Hart also writes the semi-autobiographical script) but watched by men and women alike.

“Often you just get one or maybe two women in comedy roles in a show so to have four such strong, big roles is very unusual and a lot of women comment on that. What’s interesting though is that a lot of men will say to me, ‘My girlfriend loves it and so we have to watch it but actually I quite like it too’. It’s interesting that that stigma of women not being funny is just completely destroyed. Hopefully.”

The only funny woman Hadland remembers seeing on the television as a child was Bella Emberg. “That was it,” she says incredulously. “If you were going to be a funny woman it had to be some kind of cruel thing about how you looked. And then you were allowed to be funny. But then along came Victoria Wood, Julie Walters, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French and suddenly it didn’t have to be all about that. That’s been a huge shift and I think more and more women are saying, ‘we can be funny and it doesn’t have to be all about putting us down’.”

Interestingly, in Miranda, the viewer is never laughing at someone’s expense. There’s a knowingness to the characters’ silliness and eccentricities which means we’re all laughing along together. It’s never cruel. Indeed it’s rather warm and fuzzy. There are lots of knowing looks towards the camera and there’s a “you have been watching” section over the credits reminiscent of old sitcoms like Are You Being Served? And there’s plenty of slapstick. When Miranda’s not pushing Stevie over, she’s falling over herself while Stevie looks on, laughing.

The family-friendly nature and cosy approach to the comedy of Miranda worried some of its stars at first. Was this really what people wanted? Would it feel desperately old-fashioned? Don’t people want their laughs laced with malice these days? “We were terrified,” says Hadland bluntly. They needn’t have been. The studio audiences were roaring with laughter from the first recording and audiences at home soon joined in.

The show’s stars are constantly approached by people saying that they love that they can watch the programme with their children, or with their grandparents. And Hadland never fails to be amazed by the show’s big teenage following.

“They love it!” she says with a laugh. “I think it’s because like teenagers we’re awkward, we get things wrong. It’s that thing of pretending you know what’s going on when you really don’t. I think it’s great that teenagers can relate to that and I think we all do to some degree don’t we? When you become a so-called adult you just get better at hiding it.”

Hart and Hadland are the kind of comedy duo you imagine have known each other for years, such is their knack for setting up each others’ gags. They first met however, when Hadland auditioned for the show, and they formed Stevie’s character together.

“I went to her flat with a camcorder, she had the rough bones of the script and she said ‘Let’s just mess about with this’. She quite quickly started latching on to things that I did. That’s how the Heather Small thing came about. We’d stopped filming and I was wandering around the flat talking and I just blurted out the line. She immediately went ‘Why did you do that?’ and I was like ‘Um, I don’t know, I just sing random bits out of songs…’”

Next up for Hadland is a role in a BBC2 Dickens spoof called Bleak Old Shop of Stuff. She plays a wicked governess called Primly Tightclench alongside an all-star ensemble cast including Stephen Fry, Robert Webb and David Mitchell. It may be another comedy part, but Hadland’s roles remain surprisingly diverse. She can currently be seen, for example, as the new head of English, Linda Radley, on the BBC1 drama Waterloo Road. Is she thankful that she’s not been pigeon-holed?

“Oh it’s every actor’s dream,” she says firmly. “I feel very grateful. I mean I’ve done lots of sketch shows, comedy, drama, film and I feel really, really lucky. One of the first TV jobs I did was playing a heroin addict in a few episodes of Bad Girls so it was quite interesting to then do comedy. And it was quite nice because I’ve sort of gone away and done comedy and then come back to drama.”

Last year saw her appearing in the BBC2 drama Royal Wedding, and she also popped up in the BBC’s Learners alongside David Tennant. “Both those parts were a great mix of comedy and drama and for me that’s the perfect scenario,” she says. “If you can make people laugh one minute and cry the next that’s a fantastic thing to do. It’s always much sadder, much more bitter-sweet if you’re laughing one minute and crying the next because that’s what life is like.”

It’s often said that comedy is a bigger challenge than drama. Does she agree? “With comedy there’s an absolutely clear objective: you want to make people laugh,” she says. “There’s no two ways about it. For me that’s more of a pressure than drama, but equally it’s more of a joy because you’re getting a very clear response and there’s nothing better in the world than making somebody laugh.” Even if it means being constantly pushed over? “Even that.”

Waterloo Road is on Wednesdays on BBC1 at 7:30pm, Miranda Series 2 is out on DVD on 7 November, Bleak Old Shop of Stuff will be shown this Christmas on BBC2.