JASON ISAACS: CASE HISTORIES

Long before Jason Isaacs became involved with PBS’ “Masterpiece
Mystery: Case Histories,” the concluding two-hour episode of which premieres Sunday, Oct. 30, he was intimately involved with the Kate Atkinson novels on which it’s based, having read them for audiobook versions.
This doesn’t mean, though, that prior to filming, Isaacs could have told you much about them.
“I’d forgotten it,” he says, calling in from the set of his upcoming NBC series, “Awake.” “When you follow directions from a GPS, and someone asks you which route you took, you can’t remember, because you just went left and right when it tells you.
“I just lived through all the characters and brought them all to life.
I rediscovered them when we shot. Although sometimes, I’d be in the middle of a scene, and I’d suddenly remember what it was like when I played an elderly South African lady.”
Aired as six one-hours early in the summer in the U.K., “Case Histories” premiered Oct. 16 with a two-hour episode based on the first book (actually called “Case Histories”) featuring Yorkshire-born private investigator Jackson Brodie. That was followed on Oct. 23 with an episode based on the novel “One Good Turn.”
Oct. 30 sees the premiere of an episode based on the last of the Brodie series, “When Will There Be Good News?”
Set and filmed in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh — known for its stunning architecture and multiple arts festivals — the story finds Jackson injured in a train wreck while investigating a suspicion of infidelity.
A teenage girl (Gwyneth Keyworth) saves his life and then insists, in return, that he find her missing employer. But that’s not before Jackson, while barely conscious in the hospital, makes a startling declaration to his former police colleague, D.I. Louise Monroe (Amanda Abbington).
 Also starring are Zawe Ashton, Millie Innes, Edward Corrie, Maarten Stevenson, Paterson Joseph, Natasha Little and Kirsty Mitchell.
If you’re expecting a lot of thick Scottish brogues, kilts, bagpipes and sheep, you might be surprised.
“For anyone who’s actually been to Edinburgh,” says Isaacs, “one of the most remarkable things about it is it’s almost completely absent of Scots. It’s such a fantastically beautiful place that like a magnet, it has attracted people from all over Europe.
“There’s an enormous variety of folks. There are some Scots, for sure, but many English people, many Eastern Europeans and Europeans of all hues and descriptions.”
The difference, Isaacs says, extends into the storytelling as well, since Atkinson’s books are considered “literary thrillers” (as opposed to “pulp thrillers” or just “thrillers”).
“It’s not set in the mean, gritty streets and the underbelly of Scottish cities,” Isaacs explains. “It’s not as if the crimes aren’t vicious and people don’t die, but it’s the kinds of characters one doesn’t normally find in crime fiction. … It’s more of a social satire.”
A lot of the popularity has to do with the character of Jackson Brodie.
“He’s an iconic figure for women in crime fiction,” Isaacs says. “It’s raised the bar very high in my household. Nobody could live up to the kind of white-knight universe that Jackson inhabits. Kate’s said of him that he’s made up of all kinds of bits women wish they could find in men.”
Brodie is apparently also a man not overburdened with self-knowledge.
“He’s a great, big, seething mass of contradictions,” Isaacs says. “He thinks he’s very hardhearted and cynical, but actually he’s ludicrously optimistic. He thinks he’s very emotionless, but actually he’s very sentimental, listens to country music all the time.
“He thinks he’s a great father, or tries to be, but unwittingly he exposes his kid to all the wrong things at all the wrong times. He’s such a clumsy dad. He thinks he’s hard done-by, and he’s sensitive to the people around him, but he constantly puts his foot in it. He just doesn’t know himself and is his own worst enemy, in a very entertaining fashion.”
In spite of himself, Brodie still tries to do right — and that’s another one of his problems.
“He’s unfailingly moral and ethical,” says Isaacs, “and he cannot stop himself doing the right thing, even when the last thing he ought to be doing is aligning himself with so many lost causes and no-hopers, because he just feels like something ought to be done.”
Even though Isaacs wanted a job in London so he could be with his children, when the offer came to head north, he just couldn’t say no.“Just for a second,” he says, “I fast-forwarded into a world where somebody else got to be him, and it was just unconscionable. He’s just too much fun and too juicy and too interesting and literally too much of a character for me to give up. “I would have been too envious of anybody else.”

SANCTUARY: LOFTY IDEAS ON A LIMITED BUDGET

It’s hard to find a facet of modern life that hasn’t been affected by the meltdown in the global economy, and that includes the make-believe world of TV and film. Even productions backed by major studios have been cutting back, reducing the size of their casts, and scaling back on what can be shown versus talked about.
And then there’s “Sanctuary,” the relentlessly imaginative fantasy now in its fourth season Fridays on Space: The Imagination Station. Its narrative canvas is vast as it follows Dr. Helen Magnus (Amanda
Tapping) in her quest to protect Abnormals — those things that go bump in the night — from the prejudices of human society, yet the production team brings those stories to life in a relatively small Vancouver work space and on a very tight budget.
It helps, of course, that modern digital technology has driven down costs. “Sanctuary” uses a camera system that dispenses with tape and fi lm, recording the action straight to a hard drive that allows the post-production team to have almost immediate access to a day’s work.
But the show’s secret weapon is something that’s far less hightech:
teamwork.
“We are probably the lowestbudget sci-fi show out there, easily close to $1 million below what most sci-fi shows have,” reveals Tapping, an executive producer as well as leading lady on the show.  “The secret for us is a true sense of collaboration. We realize we have a fi nite amount of money, but we have very big ideas. When we founded our company, the whole ideology was that there is … no ‘us’ and ‘them.’
We wanted to create a ‘we’ kind of environment, whereby the entire crew and cast feels like they are part of the whole in a true sense.
What you see on our set is that when the set decoration guy is struggling, half the crew rushes to help out moving stuff. Everyone has a sense of working together, which helps us save both money and time.”
Tapping says that sense of pulling together allows the show to work miracles that would seem impossible given its financial constraints.
“We have smaller built sets and then green-screen extensions, and we even made it rain inside the studio — which, when you’re shooting in Vancouver, seems a bit weird,” she says, laughing. “But that’s the kind of thing we do. We’ve never said, ‘We can’t do this.’ We always say, ‘Let’s see how we can do this.’
Our budget may seem limiting to a lot of people, but we actually make it work for us. There’s a lot of cost saving measures, but nothing that appears on-screen.”
Certainly the show’s writers haven’t let anything hobble their imaginations in the aftermath of season three, which climaxed with hordes of Abnormals who previously had lived underground now climbing their way up to what they hope will be a whole new life on the surface, which is sure to keep Helen Magnus busier than ever.  “The way we end season four is going to blow people’s minds, because it so far outside the box,” Tapping says happily. “It’s a complete shift, because the Sanctuary has gone rogue. We no longer have the support of the world’s governments.  Helen’s network of sanctuaries has broken away to be autonomous.  She realizes there is just too much discord to remain beholden to how the governments are being run, given that they are being controlled by people who are not as forward thinking as Helen, and that changes the rules for the rest of the season.”
TODD & THE BOOK OF PURE EVIL Season 2 of the original scripted series unleashes its awesome power on Sunday, Oct. 30 at 10pm. Hot off a Gemini Award win for Best Ensemble Cast in a Comedy Series, the horror comedy is back with 13 killer new episodes. With more than 55 gallons of fake blood spilled during production, the second season promises to be dark, deadly and oh-so-badass. “Todd & the Book of Pure Evil”
debuted as one of the highest-rated premieres for a Space original series and continues to gain momentum. Ending Season 1 with an epic cliff-hanger, Todd Smith and the gang return from the depths of hell for another round of gruesome adventures. In the season premiere, “Redierment Home”, Todd, Curtis and Hannah break into the retirement home to rescue Jenny from the clutches of the evil Satanic Society – now run by Atticus.
The show stars Alex House as pot-smokin’, heavy-metal-rock-god-wannabe Todd Smith; Maggie Castle as righteous babe Jenny Kolinsky; Bill Turnbull as Todd’s best bud Curtis Weaver; Melanie Leishman as big-brained Hannah B. Williams; Chris Leavins as Crowley High’s sub-par guidance counsellor Atticus Murphy Jr.; and Jason Mewes as foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed, Jimmy.

GOT BATS? HGTV CAN HELP

If you’ve got bats in your belfry, maybe HGTV can help.  No, we’re not talking mental health care, although the flying mammals that are prominently featured in the two-part special “House of Bats” can reduce some homeowners to gibbering basket cases.
The program, which airs Sunday morning, Oct. 30, follows London, Ont., bat control experts Benjamin Vaughan and Kenny Charboneau as they try to help panicky folk get rid of unwanted flying houseguests and keep them out.
“What we try to emphasize on the TV show is that this is just complex work,” explains Vaughan, who started exploring bat control while working as a chimney sweep. “It’s not something homeowners can do effectively by themselves, and it’s not something that local exterminators and pest control companies can do effectively, because bats can get into such tiny openings, and you really need a lot of construction knowledge to do the job right.” The first episode follows Vaughan and Charboneau as they try to help a woman whose dream home has turned into a nightmare now that the bats infesting her attic have started flying around her kitchen and terrorizing her and her dogs.
The second episode takes the duo inside a 19th-century church that a couple are trying to convert into their own comfy residence. Tell that to the bats in the belfry of the building, however.
“This is just very specialized work,” Vaughan says. “If someone says they’ll come and fix it for $200-300, the customers obviously desperately want to believe them instead of me, who tells them, ‘Yeah, this is going to be thousands of bucks.’ ”
More information at batcontrolspecialists.com

OLN AND BIO TURN UP THE SCREAMS A LIVE SIX-HOUR GHOST HUNTERS EVENT

They ain’t afraid of no ghosts. Ghost Hunters International features a squad of paranormal investigators who use their principles of scientific techniques to explore some of the most legendary haunted spots around the world. In this two-day marathon, the team travels to the far corners of the globe, searching for answers to bizarre supernatural mysteries.
GHOST HUNTERS HALLOWEEN LIVE SIX HOUR SPECIAL MON., OCT. 31.
Tune in for six terrifying hours of live ghost hunting as host, Josh Gates (Destination Truth) and team members from both Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters Internationalvisit Pennhurst Asylum in Pennsylvania for Ghost Hunters Halloween LIVE. Anything can happen when the lights go out and no one can predict what the team and viewers will find, hear or see. A sprawling maze of buildings constituting a former state mental institution, the asylum has been abandoned for decades and is now one of the country’s most notoriously haunted locales. At least 100 people have reportedly died on the Pennhurst State School and Hospital property and the TAPS team is on a mission to search the 1,400 acres of terror to see how many souls remain.
LINDA BLAIR BIO SUN., OCT. 30 AT 12PM ON BIO.
Profile of the actress who suffered bad press, unfounded rumours and death threats after she starred in the ultimate horror movie, The Exorcist. Determined to escape the dark side of fame, Blair would be nominated for an Academy Award and star in highly-rated TV movies of the week. However after the failure of The Exorcist II, countless “B”
films, and publicity stunts, Blair finally walked away from the limelight and redirected her attention to the fight for animal rights.
STEPHEN KING BIO: SUNDAY, OCT 30 AT 1PM
Looking into the amazing life of the “master of macabre,” whose stories have terrified readers and movie fans worldwide. The biography of Stephen King starts from his earlier days as a Maine school teacher, moves to his prolific work as author of Cujo, The Shining, Carrie, Misery and other terror classics, and finishes with the 1999 accident that nearly ended his writing career.
FRED GWYNNE  BIO SUN., OCT. 30 AT 2PM
A look into the life of Fred Gwynne, the multi-talented stage and screen star, radio performer, musician, singer, painter, and writer and illustrato of children’s books. This in-depth biography features clips from Fred’s most beloved TV series and movies, including Car 54, Where Are You?, The Munsters, and My Cousin Vinny, as well as talks with Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis.
TV-OGRAPHY: THE MUNSTERS. SUN., OCT. 30 AT 3PM.
The story of the ‘60s TV hit, The Munsters, that featured a family of lovable monsters who had no idea they were scaring their suburban neighbours. The show featured Fred Gwynne as the good-hearted dad who looked like Frankenstein; Yvonne DeCarlo as the loving vampire mother; and Al Lewis as the fun-filled, Dracula-resembling grandpa.
WITCHES: SUNDAY, OCT. 30 AT 4PM.
Shriveled ladies conjuring spells over a boiling cauldron with a few wisps of cattail, it’s an image of witches that appear in the minds of most people. This program investigates a movement that commanded veneration for centuries, and then became linked with evil intentions.
This biography starts in the present, interviewing modern day practitioners of Wicca – a 20th century pagan cult grounded in nature
- and dips into the past, exploring the movement’s origins, and its most famous practitioners.
MY GHOST STORY MARATHON: MON., OCT. 31 FROM 5PM TO 3AM.
Everybody has a ghost story, but how many people have filmed theirs?
Welcome to My Ghost Story, the 10-hour marathon, where true and unbelievable stories of the paranormal are told by the people who lived through them – and actually captured their haunting on tape.
From moving furniture to dark apparitions to violent poltergeists, these harrowing eye-witness accounts of the unexplainable are transformed into more than tales with terrifying visual evidence.

DRAGON WITH A HEART…

Being on “Dragons’ Den” is a little like going from being a salesperson to being part of the product line, Arlene Dickinson says.
Dickinson, 55, is the sole woman and the only marketing expert on the show, now in its sixth season and airing Wednesdays on CBC Television.
Yet, she says, “After years in marketing, I don’t think I really understood branding until I became a brand myself.
“It’s interesting when you’re in people’s homes, and you have an emotional connection, you start to understand the power of what that means.”
Being a brand has meant that she has a platform to talk about what matters to her, she says — such as her theories about “principled persuasion,” which is the topic of her first book, “Persuasion.”
Released in September, it’s a blend of inspiration and instruction that combines autobiography with an outline of her formula for using the gentle art of persuasion to pursue success.
But she has made it clear that she’s not always comfortable with fame.
Earlier this year, she told Chatelaine magazine that “even a small bit of fame can eat you alive and make you lose touch with who you really are.”
Asked about that, she says it’s double jeopardy. On one hand, she says she worries about getting too self-critical and trying too hard to live up to audience expectations. On the other, there’s the obvious danger of confusing yourself with the brand.
“I think it was Jane Seymour who said, ‘Never believe your own press,’
” she says. “I think you have to be super-careful that, just because you have some name recognition and some celebrity, it doesn’t change who you are as a person.”
On air, Dickinson comes across as a complex blend of control and theatricality, toughness and heart, and calm energy.
The starkest contrast is with CBC’s King of All Media, Kevin O’Leary, who always seems to have his testosterone amplifier turned to 11 — and is her main foil.
Even if you haven’t seen “Dragons’ Den,” you’re probably aware of this, because one of CBC’s favorite promotional clips for the show has Dickinson massaging her temples and telling O’Leary to shut up.
“I’ve raised four kids, and sometimes he acts like one of them,” she says, laughing.
To a large extent, Dickinson is a walking example of the power of positive thinking.
The youngest of three girls, she emigrated from South Africa to Calgary with her family as a toddler. She talks about growing up poor after her parents split up when she was 13.
In her book, she writes about being insecure and, just a few years out of high school, marrying the first man who asked her. Roughly a decade later, she found herself thrown onto the job market with little experience or education.
One of her sisters helped her land a job selling commercial time for a Calgary TV station, where she met someone who eventually invited her to join Venture Communications when it was just getting off the ground.
Within a year, she was a partner; in 10, she was the owner of the company.
“Because I grew up in a family that had its challenges, I became a very good listener,” she says. “I became very good at understanding and empathizing with how people were feeling and what they were looking for.
“And I believe that is part of great marketing. I think you have to be able to empathize and understand what your audience is looking for.”
She writes fondly of her father and his gift for teaching, even to the point of using a fire in his own house as a chance to explain to the neighborhood kids the virtues of being prepared for an emergency.
“I probably didn’t recognize the value of the influence he had or the lessons he taught me until later in life, when he became ill with cancer, and I spent a significant amount of time with him as he was going through his illness,” she says. “Much of the person I am is simply because of the values he instilled in me. Sometimes we don’t appreciate the impact our parents have on us until we’re a little bit older.”
Dickinson joined “Dragons’ Den” in its second year, bringing the male-female ratio into line with what it is in the real world.
“Twenty percent of senior management are women,” she says. “So that one-in-five rule is exactly what’s going on in the business world today.”
The subject of Dickinson’s book, principled persuasion, is, more or less, a label she has attached to an operating philosophy she developed over her years with Venture Communications.
She says she’s unlikely to do business with anyone who doesn’t believe in direct, honest communication.
“I think we all have value lines that we adhere to. Certainly, there are businesses my organization would not do business with, because of the values and beliefs we have.
“That’s not to be judgmental, but I believe that you have to be philosophically aligned with the people you do business with.”

CANADIANS: NO STANDARD PROFILE SERIES

 “Extraordinary Canadians,” a new series airing Sundays on City TV, clearly is trying to live up to its title by not taking the standard approach in the biographies of its subjects. Instead, the series pairs some of the nation’s leading contemporary writers with iconic Canadians whose work has shaped the Canadian consciousness in some way.
Some of the pairings — say, having journalist Andrew Cohen share his thoughts on Nobel Peace Prizewinning statesman and politician Lester B. Pearson — are no-brainers.  Others, such as the episode pairing philosophy professor Mark Kingwell and eccentric, iconoclastic pianist Glenn Gould, may seem more inscrutable. Happily, in this case, it also turns out to be inspired.
“I was fascinated to write about Gould in the first place, not primarily as a musician, but more as a thinker,” Kingwell explains.
“He brought a lot of thought to his performance, but he also thought and wrote a lot about music and Canada and the North and identity and the kinds of things that go into this deep conversation about what it means to be Canadian. He was just a very compelling figure overall, which is what I think makes him such a perfect candidate for this series.”
While barrels of ink have been spilled about Gould, usually by musicians and/or musicologists, Kingwell focuses instead on Gould’s often mercurial approach to his art.  It helped a lot that Gould wasn’t shy about sharing his thoughts when it came to music and other related topics, Kingwell says.
“His output of writing was massive,” he explains. “A lot of people who know him through his music don’t know that he was such a profilic writer. He was a natural communicator. He couldn’t not communicate, whether it was in his recorded music or the many, many thousands of words in his essays and reflections that he wrote.  “He was very conscious of the idea that recording and writing, inscribing things on media that would outlast his physical life, was essential to his success, to his being here. Already by the end of his life, there was this growing stature as the most important performer of the classic oeuvre in the 20th century.” For better or worse, Gould’s fame was built on twin pedestals of technical brilliance and willful eccentricity that manifested itself in a multitude of self-contradictions.  On the one hand, for example, he would talk about how music wasn’t really music until it was heard by someone else, but to watch Gould in performance, hunched over the keyboard and humming along with the melody as he played is to see a man in intimate, one-on-one communion with his art.
“Gould was kind of an elitist democrat,” Kingwell says. “He liked to use the language of democratizing art, and he thought that everybody should have exposure to things, but he also was very judgmental and narrow-minded about audiences.  When you watch him play you can see that he doesn’t care about anything apart from himself and the piano.
The score is almost like a medium that allows him to commune with music itself. In those moments, it’s just him, just a man working out his ideas in sound.” Gould spent most of his life battling health problems, some of which may have been psychosomatic, although he had only just turned 50 when he died in 1982.  Glenn Gould is one of the profile subjects on “Extraordinary Canadians.”

JAM 20: ROCK SURVIVORS

In VH1’s “Behind the Music” biography series, very often, at around the 40-minute mark, tragedy befalls the band or the singer, usually involving narcotics, alcohol or jail – or all of the above.
But in “Pearl Jam 20: American Masters,” airing Friday, Oct. 21, on KCTS – as part of the first PBS Arts Fall Festival – the two-hour documentary from director and music journalist Cameron Crowe essentially gets to the 40-minute mark and then just stays there, since all the founding members of Pearl Jam continue alive and free.
“People used to say,” Crowe says, “about some of the stories that I wrote for Rolling Stone, they would say, ‘Why don’t you write about Iggy Pop? Why don’t you write about Stiv Bators?’ And I’d be like, ‘Well, let the Stiv Bators story be written by somebody who’s invested in that music.’
“But still, that was the challenge, to do a movie about a band that wasn’t that, and did survive. That’s why there are leaps we had to take, years where literally they’re just surviving and playing concerts. So that became part of the story.” And in this story, the tragedy happens before Pearl Jam is even formed. Members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament were also in another Seattle band in the ’80s, called Mother Love Bone, with charismatic frontman Andrew Wood. Sadly, at 24, Wood died following a heroin overdose.
As to whether the film is, in a way, Wood’s story, Crowe says, “It is kind of that. When we started, that was one of the things that I really thought about. His story needed to be told, and from that, I thought the whole Pearl Jam tale should come, as it did in life.”
Toward the end of the movie, there is even footage of Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder performing one of Wood’s songs. “I did an interview with them early on,” says Crowe, “where Eddie wouldn’t tell me what song it was that he would sing, at some point, of Wood’s. So when I heard that he played ‘Crown of Thorns’ at the concert, I said, ‘Fantastic, I’ve got to get a recording.’ ” Strangely enough, it’s that lack of a “Behind the Music” tragedy that attracted Crowe to doing a Pearl Jam documentary.
“If we had the movie where somebody does die at the 40-minute mark,”
he says, “we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have done it; you wouldn’t be talking to me. Just another one of those films … .  “I always get the feeling that, if civilization disappears for a while, and all this stuff that exists now goes into a time capsule, somebody comes along later, goes, ‘Oh, rock music, it was made by people that die young.’ ”
In his 1992 fi lm “Singles,” Crowe set a romantic comedy against the backdrop of the early ’90s Seattle grunge music scene that gave Pearl Jam its start. But with little rock on the radio and the record industry in fi nancial tatters, today’s bands may not have that advantage.
“Anybody who’s got a shot,” says Crowe, “is so inundated with all the things they have to do to try to transcend the fact that there’s no radio, and there’s no culture, rock culture, that’s the same. So they’re forced to do all this mainstream stuff, if they can even get in on it. “So they have to enter in the mainstream with their tin cups out for all kinds of love and appreciation immediately.
It gives no one a chance to find them, and there’s no culture to sustain them, which is a drag.”

COOKS VIE TO GO FROM RECIPE TO RICHES

 For a lucky Canadian home cook, a cherished family recipe may take him or her to a sweet payday on “Recipe to Riches,” a new competitive reality series premiering Wednesday, Oct. 19, on Food Network.
The series splits 21 finalists, who were selected during an exhaustive cross-country audition process, into seven food categories, with three cooks facing off each week to win a cash prize of $25,000. The first category of sweet puddings and pies finds 82-year-old Gio McNeill of Lunenberg, N.S., hoping that her Luscious Lemon Pudding will prevail against the Maple Pudding Chomeur by civil servant Brad Gash, 32, of Gatineau, Que., and Surrey, B.C., food blogger Mijune Pak’s Canadian Pie-in-a-Jar.
Subsequent weeks will feature, in order, cakes, appetizers, savory pies, sweet and savory snacks, frozen treats and entrees. “Once a category winner is declared, people across Canada can go to select Loblaws across Canada and sample the winning recipe, so it’s very interactive,” explains host Jesse Palmer (“The Bachelor”). “Once all seven category finalists are determined, fans can go online and vote for the winner.  Each category winner wins a cash prize of $25,000.
The grand prize, which is totally voted by the viewers at home, is $250,000.”
But tastiness isn’t the only factor.  Each recipe must undergo tests to see whether the recipe is feasible for mass production to grocery stores and has the marketing appeal to fl y off the shelves once it’s stocked.
The judging panel includes “French Food at Home” host Laura Calder, advertising agency executive Tony Chapman and culinary director Dana McCauley, with Galen G. Weston, executive chairman of Loblaw Companies Ltd., also making a special weekly appearance.

COZY RETRO APPROACH SUITS ‘MIRANDA’ SITCOM FINE

It probably was fitting, if not inevitable, that the Britcom smash “Miranda” would make its North American debut on Vision Television, where the series currently airs on Wednesdays.
After all, British comedies are a staple on the channel, which recently announced an extensive deal with BBC Worldwide Canada for upcoming broadcast rights to such vintage hits as “Fawlty Towers”; “Yes, Minister” and its sequel, “Yes, Prime Minister”; and “The Vicar of Dibley,” among others.
Unlike those established successes, however, “Miranda” is new — a third season currently is in production in London as these previous episodes air in Canada. It just feels like a cozy, somehow reassuring throwback to those sitcoms of yore, where characters occasionally would break the “fourth wall” and talk directly to the audience, and the closing credits would feature the cast waving to the viewers, much like the endings on “Are You Being Served?”
“Miranda” is first and foremost a vehicle for Miranda Hart, the 38-year-old shooting star who currently is among the hottest names in British comedy. It’s semiautobiographical, in that Hart (who writes the show herself) gets a lot of comic mileage out of her 6-foot-1-inch frame and her tendency to self-deprecation. In real life, however, Hart doesn’t really live above a comic novelties shop on which she blew an inheritance, nor does she have a disapproving and class-conscious mother (played by Patricia Hodge on the show) who spends all her time trying to get Miranda married off. “Mum hates it because she’s worried that people think it’s her,” Hart said in a November 2010 interview with The Observer. “She’s nothing like that, thank goodness.”
Yet that running mother-daughter dynamic is a big part of the Oct. 19 episode, in which mum Penny runs into one of Miranda’s old school chums and concocts a lie about an exciting new job her daughter has landed, drawing Miranda into a snowballing series of fibs, not to mention a job interview that goes hilariously awry in record time.
The series also scores laughs with repeated references to how its title character often is mistaken for a man (a situation Hart freely admits happens to her often in real life) and has problems finding and keeping a man in her life.
The latter isn’t that big an issue for the unmarried Hart, who shares the West London home (where she writes the “Miranda”scripts) with her Shih Tzu, Peggy, and has several other single friends in her social set. The frequent jokes at the expense of her vanity, however, are something of a defense mechanism. She admits she has stopped reading reviews, which are usually across-the-board raves, because almost invariably the writers can’t seem to get past her appearance.
“As a woman, it seems you can’t just be a comedian; you’re always classed as something else, too: ‘larger than life,’ ‘the giraffe,’ ”
Hart said in a 2011 Stylist interview. “One of those comments is OK, you can deal with it, but if you read 60, even the strongest person would start feeling low.”
Still, Hart knows she’s here mainly to make people laugh, something she’s known she wanted to do ever since she was 7 years old. So if that means slapping on a garish gown designed for a transvestite, as she did in the series premiere, or taking one of the many pratfalls to which Miranda is prone, Hart is perfectly willing to go for the gag.

VAZ-OXLADE: PUTTING REAL IN TO REALITY

It’s hard to tell what irritates Gail Vaz-Oxlade more, lenders or borrowers.  Actually, the common theme between the two is fiscal irresponsibility, and it’s no secret that is what TV’s pre-eminent home finance guru has been trying to stamp out.
Since 2005 on “Til Debt Do Us Part,” Vaz-Oxlade has been administering her blend of harsh reality and tough love to teach couples — and by extension, viewers at home — some simple facts of life, such as “You can’t spend more than you earn.”
Then she branched out and took on a subspecies of spendthrift:
princesses, who not only spend more than they earn but usually spend more than everyone around them earns, too.
As Vaz-Oxlade says, these are people who see the characters in “Sex and the City” as folk heroes and think nothing of dropping $1,200 on a pair of shoes, even though “this represents their whole month’s budget.”
We’re talking financial black holes with a gravitational pull that no wallet or bank account can escape. “The thing that unites so many of the people on ‘Princess’ is their sense of entitlement,” Vaz-Oxlade says. “Over and over again, I say to them, ‘But you ask for money.’
And they reply, ‘I don’t actually ask.’ What will happen is that they’ll say, ‘I can’t make my rent,’ and people will volunteer to give them money.” Now Vaz-Oxlade is back in duplicate, with Season 2 of “Princess” debuting Monday, Oct. 17, on Slice, while a special “Baby Edition” of “Til Debt Do Us Part” continues its run, also on Mondays, on the network.  Over her six years on the air, she has poured cold reality over people who rack up thousands of dollars in debt and then go shopping for a luxury car, fill their homes with electronic toys they don’t need or waste hundreds of dollars on restaurant meals they could have made for pennies. Last year, asked why she decided to move on from “Til Debt Do Us Part,” Vaz-Oxlade said, “I got bored.”
The format of that show had become repetitive. Week in and week out, it was always couples dealing with debt issues. But this year, she was asked to come back and do another season, focusing on people overspending on a new child. “It was like, ‘Throw lots of money at Gail and make her do one more season,’ ” she says with a hearty laugh.
“But it was nice to do something slightly different.”
With “Princess,” Vaz-Oxlade goes after single people who refuse to cut the financial umbilical cord and use their credit cards as if they were money. Some of the princesses know they have a problem and apply to be on the show. Some are nominated by “the people they are sucking dry.” The formula is similar to that of “Til Debt Do Us Part”: The guru swoops down on spendthrifts on the brink of disaster, offering a reward of as much as $5,000 if they can turn over a new leaf.
This involves Vaz-Oxlade prescribing bitter medicine in often hilariously direct language. It’s not uncommon to hear words such as “fool” and “moron.” Princesses aren’t all young or all female, Vaz-Oxlade says. One episode features a young man who fits the description of princess to a T.  “I’ve had princesses as old as 40 on the show,” she says. “This isn’t a new-generation phenomenon. And I meet people in the supermarket who tell me they’d like to nominate their mothers. “There have always been people who expect other people to serve them, take care of them, clean up their messes and let them off the hook.”
This sense of entitlement and lack of direction is something Vaz-Oxlade defi nes as a “huge problem today” — and it’s fueled by a debt industry that involves banks and credit card companies more or less forcing credit on people who can’t afford it and don’t know how to handle it, she says. “We have become so accustomed to closing the gap between what we need and what we want with credit that we think of credit as disposable income. I just finished working with someone who earns $24,000 a year and has a $15,000 credit card from a major Canadian bank. “How does that happen? How does that person get a $15,000 credit limit on a credit card from a Canadian bank?”
The problem, Vaz-Oxlade says, is that banks gauge people’s credit ratings on how well they manage to make their minimum payments rather than their income level and, therefore, their ability to pay off all the debt. In other words, the people Vaz-Oxlade deals with are living the way governments do, by servicing the debt rather than paying it off. “And unfortunately, sometime, they’re not even servicing the debt.  There is no stigma attached to taking a cash advance on one credit card to make minimum payment on another. “They’re very proud of themselves.  They pay their credit cards every month using their lines of credit.”