Hart to heart

Comic Miranda on why she's loving life out of the spotlight

- BY MARC BAKER

SHE called her tell-all book I Haven't Been Entirely Honest With You. But now, comic Miranda Hart is being utterly frank when she says she no longer courts fame and wants to keep things simple.

She says: “I just wake up and think, ‘Right, what am I going to do today?’ It's walking the dog, it's playing games with my husband, watching telly and doing a bit of writing. I find life much ‘free-er’ and happier, because of that. It is a very simple life, which I love.”

Miranda made her a sitcom queen, while viewers loved her as Chummy in Call the Midwife.

But this great British funnywoman has taken a five-year break from TV. And her ongoing battle with Lyme disease revealed in her memoir earlier this year - has changed her.

“When an illness takes everything away from your life,” she hesitates. “It rammed home to me sayings like ‘you are not what you do’ and ‘you can't take it with you’ and all that stuff. It was so easy to hear.

“Until you are older and you are faced with suffering, you don't realise how true that is. Now, life is pretty good. I think that's because I'm much better at taking one day at a time.

“I have always strived to have a manageable life in line with my values.

“Not to say that it doesn’t have its difficulties, but I am just not rushing around doing things that don’t mean anything to me any more.”

The 52-year-old hid her battle with Lyme disease - a bacterial infection that can be spread to humans by infected ticks - from the public for years. Revealing it in her autobiography, she told how it had gone undiagnosed for 33 years.