Bonjour peepsickles!
“What have you done today to make you feel proud?”
Lifted from Heather Small’s song “Proud” (2000) and oft-quoted (or sung, really) in Miranda Hart’s hilarious sitcom Miranda by her best friend Stevie (Sarah Hadland), it’s a phrase used by the two best friends to inspire them to go and do great and amazing life-changing things.
It very rarely works of course but that is hardly the point since the intent and the inspiration is there and that’s all matters.
(Life is far too short to focus on the serious adult-y things; far better to conduct an orchestra made out of fruit and see how much food you can catch in your mouth as it flies out of a blender at full speed right?)
Now it seems that the star of the show, which in the words of the British Comedy Guide, focused on her character’s accident-prone nature and regularly disastrous attempts to establish a love-life”, Miranda Hart, who has enjoyed meteoric success since her sitcom debuted in 2009 and is fresh from an amazingly well-received stand-up tour of both Australia and the UK, has decided to call it quits while the sitcom is on, what she likes to call, “a high”.
Now I know your first response to this horrendous news is to scream out, wherever you may be (train commuting etiquette be damned!) “I presume you are kiddingtons.”
Sadly I am not.
She announced the news out in public and everything on Steve Wright’s BBC Radio 2 show, according to BBC News, and while I am, in the words of Miranda’s old boarding school pal “flabagastamoomoo”, there’s no escaping that she said this:
“I’m actually coming to the end of the whole sitcom. I’m doing two Christmas specials, but they are going to be the finale of the show, full stop.”
And then went on to say this:
“People have loved the character, which is so nice and amazing for me. But as she gets older I don’t want her to keep falling over and make a complete fool of herself.”
So there we have it then.
After two more Christmas specials, which are filming in November, and the release of a book The Best of Miranda: Favourite Episodes Plus Added Treats – Such Fun!, that will be very sadly that.
I am, what Miranda’s mother Penny (Patricia Hodge) likes to call, deeply saddened.
My only wish is that Miranda will finally and will as many pratfalls and word stumbles as possible, get her man, one Gary Preston (Tom Ellis), who is, again in Tilly parlance, “marvilisimous, fabulasmic, Brillo pads! and totes amazeballs”.
Miranda Hart, naturally, will be keeping very busy with her new stand-up career – she made her name doing one woman performance pieces which is how she came to the attention of the BBC in the first place – and the hosting of an updated version of British entertainment show The Generation Game.
And of course should the pining for Miranda prove too great, there is a DVD release of the 2010 and 2012 Miranda Christmas specials on November 24 as well as the DVD of her stand up tour My, What I Call, Live Show a week earlier on November 17.
Just remember that sad though this news is, there’s “No need to get emotional, we’re not Spanish”.