Last Night's TV - Miranda Series 2 Episode 4 Review

Last night I suffered through Miranda, starring Miranda Hart. The laugh-a-minute fun-extravaganza is Miranda€™s second series on BBC1 and follows the trials and tribulations of her extremely odd everyday life. Last night€™s episode, entitled New Low, saw Miranda trying to compete with her friend Stevie (Sarah Hadland) in keeping up with their new €™20 something€™ friend Tamara (Stacy Liu), who is young and trendy. Cue a lot of jokes about being mid 30s and going clubbing/staying awake/wanting to go to bed early. None of which made me laugh, but most made me cringe. One or two made me want to weep openly. The episode also had Miranda€™s Mother (Patricia Hodge), who is obviously knocking around the 60 mark, deciding she needs a mobile phone so she can receive saucy texts from Miranda€™s Father. Cue a boatload of jokes about old people not getting technology, which quite frankly were identical to those I hated in Trollied the other night. Miranda is also trying to build a relationship with Gary (Tom Ellis) the less than manly chef who is trying to prove he€™s an alpha male. It finishes with a big surprise that Tamara, who happens to be from Hong Kong, is Gary€™s wife and he had married her so she could get a green card to study in the UK. Sounds a bit like Coronation Street. Miranda kicks off and then it all gets dramatic, but still has daft jokes along the lines of Miranda storming out of her own flat. I seem to recall that joke being on Friends about 15 years ago and probably a load of other shows before and since. To be honest the majority of the jokes and story strands in this episode alone have been done over and over and over a million times before. I€™m struggling to understand how the show is into Series 2 on the BBC when as a writer myself I continually hear that scripts need to have originality. Miranda feels like a cut and paste job that has stolen from every other sitcom that has ever been written and she should be hung, drawn and quartered for theft or at least sued for plagiarism. So€ in conclusion €“ Miranda bumbles around her unoriginal life telling unfunny jokes with her stupid friends and now I've spent a small slice of my life suffering through it I feel like I've lost half an hour and I may just cry.

Sean Lock €“ Lockipedia

After the horror show that was Miranda I settled down for some quirky comedy from Mr Sean Lock. Lock is a genuinely funny man with a slightly weird sense of humour and was exactly what I needed to get over my previous televisual experience. Lockipedia should be somewhere on 4OD or at least available on the tinterweb as a DVD and I would recommend it to anyone who has a sense of humour and wants to murder Miranda. It calmed, soothed and entertained me so I was able to stop crying and go to sleep. Thank you Mr Lock.