Jennifer Saunders

Dawn French enjoys night out Jennifer Saunders

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

BBC axes Jam & Jerusalem despite rising ratings

The BBC has axed the comedy drama Jam & Jerusalem by Jennifer Saunders.

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.

Anyway, "I blame Princess Diana" said Jam & Jerusalem's quintessentially stiff-lipped Caroline (Jennifer Saunders) while talking about the prevailing mood of dreadful wetness and soppiness during last Sunday's excruciating dinner party, which was also attended by Dawn French's lady-who-doesn't, Rosie, and kindly Sal (Sue Johnston), thus turning it into a kind of oestrogen-drenched comedy masterclass, albeit writ rather small and bittersweet, rather as if Jennifer (with co-writer Abigail Wilson) has finally got all that relentless comedy shouting out of her system, and grown up.

Anyway, Caroline was so constipated by her class that she referred to her son, fighting in "the Helmand", as if he was killing time by doing something slightly irksome like pulling up weeds on the drive or putting the rubbish out. Caroline's lip was, obviously, only allowed to tremble when she assumed no one else could see it.

I don't know - perhaps this scene was all the more touching for being aired the day after the announcement of the 200th military death in Afghanistan, but actually I disagree with Caroline; let's not blame Princess Diana for becoming a nation of soppy emotional incontinents; instead let's blame her former sister-in-law, Sarah, Duchess of York instead.

Society worth preserving

Sometimes the best moments on television are the ones that blindside you, coming from an angle you don't expect.

There was a nice example in Jam & Jerusalem last night, a little moment of extraordinarily intense feeling staging an ambush on an audience that was probably meandering along perfectly happily, expecting to be called on for nothing more than a gentle chuckle or a half smile of recognition. It brought tears to my eyes, in fact, which was partly just sympathetic vibration, since everybody on screen was dabbing at theirs, but was also something to do with how true the scene was to the little society that Jennifer Saunders has created in Clatterford. Maybe the scheduling helped too - this series of the rural sitcom having been written in 30-minute segments but transmitted in three hour-long episodes, a slot that makes it easier to think of it as a wry kind of drama rather than a sitcom.

There's a dramatic change of pace when the normally silly Jam & Jerusalem gets a bit serious and even a little weepy. Hearty, horsey countrywoman Caroline (played by Jam & Jerusalem's co-writer Jennifer Saunders) throws a dinner party at her substantial home, though because she's socially inept, she ends up with a guest list of people she doesn't want to entertain. But, in some unexpectedly poignant and touching scenes, Caroline struggles to come to terms with the posting of her young soldier son to Afghanistan and it's up to her neighbours to provide support. It's a nice interlude, as is the unfolding of a surprising romance between two of Clatterford's more shy and misunderstood inhabitants. But fear not, Jam & Jerusalem's broad farce is still in evidence as the guildswomen throw a chaotic fashion show to raise funds for the town's cash-strapped boutique, House of Mary's.

Jennifer Saunders's light-hearted WI sitcom is Sunday night whimsy at its best. Tonight's episode has a touch of Miss Marple about it as Sal (Sue Johnston) decides to snoop around the construction site with a camera and notepad in the hope of finding some evidence of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Caroline (Saunders) plans a dinner party for her husband's London friends. However, things inevitably go awry when she accidentally invites Rosie (Dawn French) and the vicar.

The brilliant Jam and Jerusalem continues with an episode that has Caroline (Jennifer Saunders) throwing a dinner party at her enormous home - and finds the guests aren't quite the ones she would have liked. As ever, there's some beautifully observed comedy of social manners here, and always played with a big heart and sense of fun that's hard to resist. As lovely as a hot buttered crumpet!

'I've got some crystal meth in the fridge,' piped up posh Caroline at a Women's Guild drugs talk in the village hall during the painful Jam & Jerusalem). 'I actually prefer it to Dom Perignon!' This was Jennifer Saunders saving the best joke for herself, even though Caroline is only a bit part. Yes, seriously, that was the best joke.

Jam And Jerusalem is so relentlessly rubbish it actually made me suspect that I'd been on crystal meth when finding Absolutely Fabulous so funny back in the day. Because it's almost impossible to believe this bumpkinbaiting effort, which might as well be called Aren't Country Folk Daft?, is the work of the same person. La Saunders must have been sniffing way too much manure in her country retreat to imagine that J&J is fit for anything other than mulching out as a makeweight repeat on G.O.L.D.

It's almost painful to watch the likes of Sue Johnston and David Mitchell work their socks off to inject something passing for life into their cardboard cut-out characters. And the world can surely live without Dawn French contributing yet another variation on her busty yokel simpleton routine, though admittedly she does do gumby with a certain gusto.

Jennifer Saunders's strange tales of bucolic madness and comic grotesques, a sort of The League of Ladies as opposed to The League of Gentlemen, returns briefly for a three-part series. Nothing much has changed in Clatterford, where everyone is bonkers, particularly the members of the local women's guild. These include widowed Sal (Sue Johnston) who is trying and failing to cut down on her drinking, though she's roused from her frequent stupors when she learns that developers are converting a barn at the bottom of her garden. Rumour has it that it's for the suave Charles Dance, which sends most of the women into a frenzy of lust. But Sal is determined to put up a fight, despite the objections of her straitlaced son (played by David Mitchell), who fears she will damage his prospects of becoming a Lib Dem MP. It's a silly little tale full of comedy drunkenness and low farce - there's even a subplot about the local vicar apparently behaving disreputably. But daft as J&J is, there's still something oddly endearing about it.