Miranda and Miranda: Feminism, Femininity and Performance

Abstract

Ground-breaking feminist work on women and television comedy in the 1990s addressed its potential for subversive, unruly performance, largely focusing on North American stars such as Lucille Ball and Roseanne Arnold (Mellencamp, 1992; Gray, 1994; Rowe, 1995). This chapter, however, is concerned with how British class identities intersect with the femininity and feminism of a contemporary comedy star and her eponymous sitcom — Miranda Hart and Mirand? (BBC, 2009–2014).¹ If Hart is an ‘unruly woman’ (Rowe, 1995) she successfully mobilizes discourses of upper middle class Englishness as a means of mitigating the threat of unruly femininity in television comedy. In British comedy, class is always in play, and Mirand? has come under public scrutiny for its ‘middle class’ constituency (Cook, 1982; Lockyer, 2010; Frost, 2011). Shortly after his appointment as controller of BBC1 in 2011 Danny Cohen commented that too many sitcoms were about middle class people:

Sources say that he feels the Beeb is ‘too focused on formats about comfortable, well-off middle-class families whose lives are perhaps more reflective of BBC staff than viewers in other parts of the UK’, and that we need more of ‘what he describes as “blue-collar” comedies’. (Leith, 2011)