DVD review by Steve Bennett

Any show that starts, unironically, by geeing the audience up with s Club 7’s Reach For The Stars, is probably never going to be filed under esoteric, fiercely intelligent stand-up.

Miranda Hart, instead, plays to her strengths in seeking to create a party atmosphere in the traditionally soulless O2. Yes, it may be her first tour but she’s plunged straight in at the arena level, thanks to the runaway popularity of her BBC One sitcom.

She takes her party hostess task quite literally, chucking out cheesy snacks to go with the cheesy music. Some of the ‘such fun!’ rabble-rousing doesn’t really suit a DVD though, proving too big and loud for home viewing.

Yet in other touches she plays exactly to the home audience, particularly in the asides to camera borrowed from the TV show. Some of her anecdotes and 'life-awkward moments', as she clunkily describes them, seem like slighty risqué outakes from the sitcom, too, as she vividly relives some of her more humiliating pratfalls. Both the ’trapped wind’ debacle and her one-and-only experience of drug-taking are lovely bits of descriptive slapstick.

Her physicality is there, too, right down to grubbing around on the floor when the stand-up demands it, or mimicking a musical theatre run.

These are highlights of the stand-up which elsewhere plays it safe and familiar – but even so Miranda’s genial, gleeful posh-girl enthusiasm goes a long way. And as if her audience could care less about how original her routines are...

It’s that broad likeablity which Beeb bosses will hope to call on for the ‘son of Generation Game’ show she is working on – and across this DVD there’s also a chance to see her people skills, both with the audience in general and a young couple she invites up for a date in particular. She sets up the gig as a ‘cocoon’ – or more formally, ‘a cocoon o’fun’ – partly for the simple joy of rolling the plummy word around her mouth, partly to reassure the huge crowd all is safe and, despite what it may seem, intimate.

This helps the atmosphere permeate down to the small screen, and come the celebratory video finale, with callbacks a-plenty, the sentiment is uplifting, no matter the simplicity of some of the earlier stand-up routines.

Review date: 20 Nov 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett