Dawn French

Dawn French enjoys night out Jennifer Saunders

Dawn French looks radiant on a night out - her wedding ring and sparkler still firmly ON.

Divorced Dawn French & Lenny Henry return from holiday

Dawn French and Lenny Henry cheerfully return from holiday together despite their divorce.

Dawn and Lenny: Just good friends - or just good actors?

The 'amicable' split to which Dawn French and Lenny Henry aspire is more common than we might imagine.

The woman who stayed in a hotel room with Lenny Henry

The woman who stayed in a hotel room with comedian 11 years ago breaks silence on Lenny Henry and Dawn French divorce.

The REAL reason it's all over for Lenny and Dawn

Dawn French's biographer reveals the truth behind the split between French and Lenny Henry.

End of 25-year double act for comedy couple

Comedy couple Dawn French and Lenny Henry's 25-year marriage seemed one of the strongest in show business.

The woman Dawn French called 'the blip'

How Lenny Henry's marriage never recovered from his 'fling' with blonde.

The alternative comedy collective could be wonderful and they could be awful, often within the same episode. These two tales, first screened in 1984, display the best and the worst of the team's endeavours. Dawn French plays the lead in the love-story parody Susie, while Rik Mayall takes centre stage (surely not?) in the spaghetti western homage A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques. Sitcom veteran Bob Spiers directs both. Patchy scripting was a curse but ambitious, cinema-style visuals and a desire to experiment made the Strip a force to be reckoned with.

Comediennes are not the most conventionally alluring creatures on television - Dawn French, Victoria Wood and Jo Brand, to name a few, have often exploited their comfortable shape to hilarious ends.

So it will come as no surprise that striking funny-girl Olivia Lee, whose one-woman sketch show - Dirty, Sexy, Funny - starts on Comedy Central next week, has struggled to marry her glamorous appearance with her comic buffoonery.

"It has been hard sometimes getting people to take me seriously as a comedienne because people look at me and think: 'She's not going to be funny', says Olivia, 29. But that's a good thing because I am changing the cliched perception and bringing a bit of glam to it. You don't have to look funny to be funny - and there are always prosthetics which I can use in some of the sketches, although that is more for disguise in the hidden-camera bits."

A verse of Cole Porter's song Be a Clown goes: "Why be a great composer with your rent in arrears/Why be a major poet and you'll owe it for years?/When crowds'll pay to giggle if you wiggle your ears?/Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown."

Miranda Hart, who plays 'herself' in the new comedy series Miranda, has studied the meaning of the song and has had the guts and the talent to follow its guidance. Guts, because the comedy centres on her ungainliness - too tall (over six feet) for modishness, not fat but too fleshy; big feet and hands; a long face made lovely only with a smile. Talent, in living up to her billing as a successor to the now middle-aged Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, with whom she has worked and from whom, it seems, she has learned much.

And part of that learning is that clowning is a hard matter, especially if - instead of wearing flapping shoes, baggy pants and a red nose - you present yourself to the camera and say: here am I, mid-thirties, look like this, no boyfriend, what are the chances? Come and laugh at me finding out.

All this is clowning, but with sophistication. Miranda - as her name, education and mother's comportment betray - is upper middle-class, but neither she nor the class is mocked for it: the comedy lives in a world where, even in Surrey, there is a downside, as well as an upside, in being raised this way. The two friends are ghastly, not in an upper-class way but rather in seeking to live like pseudo-celebrities, all shrieks and "Omigods!" and shopping therapy. The farcical episodes - knocking over coat stands, being mistaken for a transvestite, licking a chocolate penis (part of her stock) in the street - succeed each other naturally and hilariously because they are linked back to the central character, whose brilliance shines the more in what had been something of a parched season for comedy.