It was announced over a year ago; she has being giving interviews on the subject for months, and now Miranda Hart's debut comedy tour is finally upon us. On Friday the queen of prime-time TV takes to the stage at the Bournemouth International Centre and embarks on her biggest gamble since the sitcom Miranda premiered in 2009.
The success of that sitcom, and the subsequent popularity of the drama series Call the Midwife, has established her as one of the country's best-loved entertainers. But her live standup experience is minimal and was acquired in small venues, not arenas. In a fortnight, she will play the O2.
So is she up to it? Or is My, What I Call, Live Show (as she's titled it) setting up the nation's pratfaller-in-chief for her biggest tumble yet? Arena touring, says comedy promoter Christian Knowles – whose client Micky Flanagan is one of the UK's top arena-level standups – can be a big risk commercially, especially for an inexperienced comic.
"The overheads may be nothing compared to [rock acts] Prince or Pink coming in with truck after truck," he said. "But by standup standards, it's still a small army you're sending around the country. And the rents on those venues are massive. But if you can sell it, of course financially it's a no-brainer: you can be massively successful."
Hart isn't alone in taking advantage of the boom in live comedy, which has opened lucrative opportunities to popular TV stars that were not available to the sitcom heroes of yesteryear: Dawn French, for example, announced her debut solo tour last week.
But French isn't calling her show standup; and neither did Sandi Toksvig and John Cleese, two other well-loved comedy figures who recently took their personalities on the road. They sold their live tours as "audiences with", book tie-ins – or, in French's formulation, "somewhere between a monologue, a play, and an autobiographical slide show".
Hart hasn't given herself a get-out clause. She's calling it standup, and the show will be judged alongside the likes of Lee Evans, Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay – arena regulars into whose territory Hart is pitching herself.
Hart's TV profile probably insulates her against commercial failure. Pre-tour sales are strong: five dates at the O2 in London are scheduled, with a further two at Wembley Arena in October, and several shows – including two at the National Indoor Arena (capacity 12,000) in Birmingham – are sold out.
As you would expect of a woman who has turned self-abasement into a comedic art form, Hart has been candid about her pre-tour anxieties. (She suffered from agoraphobia in her early twenties.) But, in an interview in November last year for the Daily Mail she insisted: "I'm looking forward to the tour. I'm looking forward to being in a room with the people who have supported me and watched the sitcom, and being able to thank them for that. And to have a laugh with them.
"I want it to be a real show that we share, rather than it being about me, showing off my attempt at the art of standup."
Hart's prior standup experience is limited, and she has not done it at all since finding fame as the star of her self-titled sitcom.
Now 41, she took sketch shows to the Edinburgh fringe in the 1990s, and performed in the double act The Orange Girls with Charity Trimm. (Their show, wrote Financial Times critic Ian Shuttleworth, "create[s] the impression that they are less funny than is in fact the case".)
Hart then performed solo character-comedy shows throughout the early part of the past decade, but she admitted to BBC Radio 5 Live when announcing her tour: "I've never done a full standup show."
She has been performing secret warm-up gigs in advance of the tour. "And after the third gig," she told an interviewer, "it felt like it was the hundredth, and I felt really comfortable on stage."
She has her material well prepped: "I'll be examining universal social embarrassment and general life conundrums," she said.
An anecdote about meeting the Queen is promised, and material on "my attitude to food and my irritation with diets. [And] the odd tiny ranting moment that you can't do in a sitcom."
And she's not a complete stranger to large venues. She has appeared on several high-profile charity bills in recent years, including a role in a new Blackadder sketch with Rowan Atkinson and Tony Robinson at a Prince's Trust fundraiser at the Albert Hall in 2012.
Whether that's sufficient preparation for a tour to which fans flock in their thousands to see Hart and Hart alone, remains to be seen. Christian Knowles sees no reason to doubt it. "Even for experienced standups, the first time they do an arena it's a massive learning curve," he said. "But in the end, as long as the show's good, they'll find their feet quite quickly."
"I've seen standups who've worried about adapting their material to that scale, when in fact the best advice is, 'no, just do your show'. If Miranda's got a good show, I see no reason why she can't be just as funny on a big stage as she is on TV."
My, What I Call, Live Show opens at Bournemouth International Centre, from Friday until Sunday, then goes on tour.
