Miranda Hart

If you watched "Call the Midwife" on PBS on Sunday nights, I would bet that you have fallen in love with Camilla Fortescue-Cholmondeley-Browne, known to her friends/fellow midwives as "Chummy" and played by the wonderful Miranda Hart. Chummy comes from an upper class background, but couldn't be more "of the people" if she tried. She is warm-hearted and generous and socially awkward and thoughtful and clumsy and is my absolutely favorite character on the show. I loved her since she first fell off the bicycle. (Okay, that isn't true. I loved her from when she protected her first patient from the doctor's insensitivity.)  She is the reason that I stuck with the show; I was ready to give up after the first episode, but I said I would watch one more and that's when her character was introduced.

So because I became such a fan of Chummy,  I went on a hunt to find "Miranda", Miranda Hart's eponymous Brit sit com. Luckily, I found it on my local PBS station. It is HILARIOUS!!  It is on after 11pm on Friday nights here so I DVR it and watch it first thing on Saturday. It is my new Saturday morning cartoon. I have literally laughed out loud at the show at least three times every episode. It is a bit "Bridget Jones"-esque with the single girl and the pushy mother and the kooky friends and the unattainable hot guy and the embarrassing situations, but the tone is so much more upbeat than "Bridget Jones".  Plus, "Miranda" has this uncanny ability to bounce back from all of the embarrassing situations. (Granted, it is television, but, boy! don't I wish I could be more like that?!?) Normally, I don't like shows that put the main character in embarrassing situations (Meet the Parents was a nightmare for me; I wanted to crawl under my chair and die!), but I haven't had to fast forward through "Miranda" at all. (Okay, well, honestly, I did fast forward during one of the first episodes I watched. Then I rewound and watched the bit I thought would be too painful to watch, and it was fine. In fact, it was hilarious. Lesson learned.)

Anyhow, the show isn't out on DVD in the US, so you can't get it from Netflix or the library, and it isn't worth buying on DVD unless you have a regionless DVD player, which I don't, although I can watch Region 2 DVDs on my laptop, but I digress... So you have to hunt it down on PBS (or the interwebs, but you didn't hear that from me) because it doesn't seem to be on BBC America either. (But "Star Trek the Next Generation" is... that's a topic for another time.) Hopefully, the BBC will try to capitalize on the success of "Call the Midwife", and  "Miranda" will end up on DVD here soon. Until then, I will not be purging my DVR, and you can watch clips on the BBC One website. A new series of "Miranda" is set to broadcast soon; I can't wait until they show it here!! As Miranda's mother Penny would say, "Such fun!"



[And for all of you playing "Name That Brit" at home: I knew that I had seen Gary (the unattainable hot guy) before: he was Tom the doctor on "Doctor Who" that Martha was going to marry until she decided to marry Mickey instead. ]