Hermione Eyre

In bed with Miranda Hart ... what fun!

Miranda Hart is the Joyce Grenfell of the Twitter generation. Her sitcom commands four million viewers per episode because, as Jennifer Saunders puts it, 'she has funny bones'...

Last week Charlie Brooker's characteristically brilliant Newswipe started, taking a pin to the over-inflated lilo of news journalism. He's the only man who can make quantitative easing funny and has the gift of seeming, even after several hugely popular series, like a normal person who has invaded a studio.

Beautiful People comes running on to the screen and licks you all over. It's a Labrador of a sitcom, so eager to please it's exhausting. It's like The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, except camp. Screamingly, thrashingly, life-threateningly camp.

Although there are many lovely moments where it seems to revive - I am afraid that it ultimately dies of camp. Such a pity! Some of the two schoolboys' dialogue is priceless (aspiring intellectuals, they pronounce 'epitome' to rhyme with 'gnome') and little Layton Williams as the lead's best friend Kyle (or as he insists on being known, Kylie) is just brilliant, a star in the making. Olivia Colman as the mother is fabulously warm. There are some killer lines (Two fashion pointers: never wear nylon, and never wear nylon bought for you by a blind person).

But as with Ugly Betty, the problem is that it tries too hard to bring a camp aesthetic overground; to deliver a mainstream version of camp when by definition camp is a secret, niche sensibility.

A shudderingly badly written new TV drama that wouldn't last beyond the first week in a theatre. On TV it'll carry on for six godforsaken episodes. It is one of those vaguely unpleasant pieces that thinks it's a black comedy but has neither the charm nor the cruelty to pull it off.

People shitting in other people's shoes? Hilarious, I'm sure. The soundtrack - a knowing, jaunty tango - amplifies every failing.

The estimable cast - Marc Warren, Alexander Armstrong - have a vaguely betrayed air, as if they know the script can barely cover their naked shame. Only Keeley Hawes has thrown her heart into it, seeming to relish her shallow, unappealing character. I used to really like her as an actress. One line for me sums up the poverty of this script. A poor child actor had to deliver a bombshell about his parents' infidelity. He was only a kid but he still seemed to cringe as he said the words: Is Uncle Carl in heaven? Good. Now he won't be able to shag mummy any more. Can you think of a smarmier, more contrived line of dialogue? A more obvious plot-hinge, a cheaper, nastier, less plausible sentence for a child to deliver?

TV is getting all slippery and self-conscious, putting distance between its actions and its intentions like a ship drifting from its moorings. Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach are twin programmes: a soap about the making of a soap, followed by the soap itself. Faced with this clever-clogs chimera, all you can do is trust your gut.

Mine was applauding, an anatomical mystery and also a programming one: how could something that sounded, on paper at least, so wearyingly self-referential and laborious end up so much fun? Moving Wallpaper begins when a hideously arrogant producer (played with miraculous likeability by Ben Miller) is drafted in to save a new soap set in Cornwall. The first thing he does is install an LA-style wetroom in his office. Then he sets about sexing up the soap, changing its name from Polnarren to Echo Beach, and making the focus not disenfranchised fishermen but lissom young surfers. He casts it to please the ITV demographic, recruiting Jason Donovan in to play the Cornishman returning to his roots. On set, he's thoroughly ruthless: a child actor is refusing to cry, so he strides over: "I've got some terrible news. It's about your parents..."

Moving Wallpaper concludes with its production team settling down to watch the show they've created, staring into your television like The Royle Family. And so Echo Beach begins, full of soaring aerial shots of Cornwall and trendy music. It would have been tempting to make the show very obviously creaky, a la Acorn Antiques, but they've resisted that and made something more unsettling and subversive. Echo Beach is entirely believable as a soap, but the cynical goggles you've acquired from the first half mean you see through it instantly. It's like watching Hollyoaks using the cranium of Kevin Lygo as opera glasses.

The jokes set up in the first half come nicely to fruition: the child actor is bawling her eyes out, a character renovating a house wants to put in a wetroom, and clunky scriptwriting justifies why Jason Donovan has a Cornish name but an Aussie accent. All good clean post-modern fun. Or rather, given the plotline about Susie Amy giving sexual favours for a walk-on part, all good slightly mucky post-modern fun.

Jack Dee's new sitcom Lead Balloon has gone down like anything but. It is so successful it has grown too big for BBC4. It will now be broadcast on BBC2 as well.

Whatever channel it's on, Lead Balloon is well worth watching. It is a delectable comedy of everyday embarrassment, and as such feels exquisitely British. But in fact America did it first, with Larry David's sublime Curb Your Enthusiasm. Lead Balloon is such a good rip-off of Curb Your Enthusiasm that you sometimes forget it's a fake: the set piece in each episode where Jack Dee, aka Rick Spleen, retreats into a private fantasy, such as shooting the postman, or hand carving missing letters on a christening mug, is a superb innovation.

But more often, unfortunately, Lead Balloon shows awkward joints where Curb Your Enthusiasm has invisible seams. Larry David is a fundamentally good man, driven to obnoxious behaviour; Rick Spleen is just an obnoxious man. The same goes for the guest actors in each episode of Lead Balloon: they tend to go looking for confrontation, rather than finding it creep inexplicably upon them. Lead Balloon is a more callow creation than CYE. I don't feel bad about saying so. To make a show as derivative as Lead Balloon is to invite comparisons.