Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this Christmas is Miranda Hart. She writes and stars in the hit

sitcom Miranda and has conquered her way to the top of TV comedy by exploiting that universal truth

that awkwardness lies at the heart of the human condition.

Slapstick and misunderstanding underpin her work,

along with the impression that she's just a really jolly lovely gal,

given that her father was a naval commander and her mother has devoted much of her life to

attending a glorious garden in Hampshire, that would seem about right. However, making her mark has been

something of a slog. After her first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe, it would be

another 11 years before she could chuck in her job as an office temp.

For a good while, she was photocopying the scripts for comic relief rather than performing them.

She says, I started writing comedy because it was more fun inside my head than the real world but that's no longer true.

Merry Christmas and welcome Miranda Hart. You are a real lover of Christmas, the mulled wine, the mince pies,

the roaring fires, the carols., the mince pies, the

carols, I have to say I hope you appreciate we've gone to some effort today on

our Desert Island for you. Yeah I like the tree and the fact that you were wearing

antlers. I will in fact put them on now, my felt antlers. I'm warringly fetching. Yes,

and I'm worryingly I'm quite attached to them now. In the build-up to this program I found this Edinburgh

fringe flyer for your 2005 show and it reads

Miranda doesn't fit in exclamation mark she was born into an upper class

...