Such fun! Only Miranda wasn't having fun at all...

Comedian, actor and writer Miranda Hart vanished from TV after her hit show ended. Now, a decade later, her new book I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You’ reveals how she had to withdraw from the limelight after suffering a collapse’

- JASPER REES

For five years from 2009, Miranda Hart gave her name to a sitcom about a gangly singleton that reached audiences touching 10 million. Its fans were so tickled by her confident use of oldschool slapstick and user-friendly catchphrases (such fun)! that it was promoted from Radio 4 to BBC Two to BBC One. On the back of its phenomenal popularity, in 2014 Hart sold out the O2 Arena with her My, What I Call Live Show. She had arrived in the entertainment stratosphere and the world was at her feet. Yet the final words in Miranda now look prophetic: “Dearest chums, I don’t know when or if we’ll ever see each other again...”

Across most of the past decade, you can count Hart’s appearances on the fingers of one hand. She played Miss Hannigan in a West End revival of Annie in 2017. That year most of her cast gathered as pop-up entertainers in the Royal Variety Performance, and two years later all reconvened to celebrate the show’s 10th anniversary at the London Palladium. In 2020, she was perfect casting as Miss Bates, the prattling spinster in Jane Austen’s Emma. Then came Covid.

But mostly, a comic actor credited with almost singlehandedly reviving the sitcom genre seemed to have withdrawn from the public eye. Where on earth did she go and where has she been? The answer is a bombshell that comes in a moving new book. Its title – I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You – promises careful revelation. Then you get to the first paragraph: “When I collapsed, I needed answers for what to do right there and then. It was a chronic situation, but it was still a crisis. I couldn’t make myself a kale smoothie, or get to a yoga class, and I had no inclination to journal a gratitude list. I was ill and I was alone and I was debilitated.”