Kathryn Flett

Miranda is apparently created in a 1970s retro sitcom factory in which leftover bits of Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendal had been mixed up with some Cath Kidston wallpaper to create a kind of comedy mache, if you will - which was in turn left to dry inside a set made of balsa wood and tissues (though sadly not in front of a live studio audience) before viewers are invited to see whether their laughter makes it fall over or merely wobble a bit before righting itself...

Comedically speaking, Miranda Hart's size is apparently everything, so I fear she can never be considered funny outside of the context of her height, and nobody ever says that about Stephen Merchant.

Hart presumably came to terms with the innately sexist Tall = Funny equation (she's 6ft 1in) some years ago, so gags focusing on the idea of a thirtysomething woman who is clearly slightly surprised to be 6ft 1in are bound to feel a bit weird, as if Hart had only just swallowed the contents of the "Drink me" bottle and woken up all oooooh-errr!

But if you can accept the idea that a large lady tripping over cardboard boxes a lot, and being styled like Danny La Rue ("Oh Miranda, why are you dressed like a transvestite?!"), and having an unrequited crush on a handsome chef, not to mention Patricia Hodge as her elegantly trim mother, are intrinsically amusing, then Miranda is very amusing.

For everybody else, though, it's merely a cheap-looking sitcom starring a big girl who keeps being mistaken for a man ("Did he just call me Sir?"), despite not looking remotely like one. Kind of camp, sort of silly and a little bit sweet, but not, I think, quite enough of any of those to matter, Miranda feels like a throwback to an ancient, lost comedy era that is, if not quite pre-Cambrian, then certainly mid-20th century, pre-Cowell.

The Thick of It returned to our screens having been promoted from BBC4 to BBC2, which, obviously, in no way mirrored the promotion of Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front) who has moved from absolutely nowhere to secretary of state at the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship.

Thus far, Nicola is holding her own despite being denied the extraordinarily amusing (swearing can be both funny and clever, but don't tell the kids) lexicon of foul-mouthed invective habitually gifted to Tucker, while already participating in the visual gag of the year (decade? millennium?) so far.

Meanwhile, Jesus H f***ing Corbett (as Malcolm would, and indeed does, say), I dearly wish I could share some of last night's magisterial Tuckerisms but, thrillingly, every single one is such unquotable uberfilth that, fingers crossed, we'll soon see Malcolm on Question Time.

And then just as I was bathed in a warm critical glow that conceivably wasn't even menopausal, I made the mistake of tuning belatedly into Trinity (ITV2), a... um... er... thriller? Comedy? Drama? Sod it, a programme about a bonkers Ivy League-meets-Hogwarts British university full of freaks and sex addicts so charmlessly crass, cynically smutty, joyless, unfunny and badly written and acted (despite starring Charles Dance and Claire Skinner. What. Were. They. Thinking?) that I immediately signed up to the show's Facebook group, where questions such as: "So who looks like the better snog, Theo or Dorian?" (posed by a wicked Wizard of Oz-style ITV employee, presumably), are asked while a horde of 15-year-old girls cyber-shout "Dorian!"

But although buff, beautiful and entirely leech-free, Dorian (Christian Cooke) is a long way from being a pre-watershed hero - no girl would be safe with him alone in a well lit room, much less Afghanistan or a volcano.

Meanwhile, I am still trying to work out if the return of Vic'n'Bob's Shooting Stars (BBC2) made me smile as much as it did mostly because it was as funny as I'd hoped it would be, if not more so (and a much-needed antidote to the tediously testosterone-fuelled swaggery-smuggery of most TV panel shows), or because it reminded me of 1994, which was a favourite year of mine. No matter, as the contestants (so sweetly and naively) chanted all way back in Big Brother 1, "It's only a game show."

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.

Anyway, from its terrible casting (an exception is made for Elizabeth Berrington's fabulously cartoon-vile uber-mum, Ffion) to its uncomfortable script (in one how-could-this-ever-have-made-the-edit? scene, Boyd's David watches Alice dress up as an 11-year-old and admits he's "really turned on") to its total dislocation from any audience demographic I can think of, May Contain Nuts was fairly disastrous on every conceivable level.

The world's gone mad. Here we have ITV adapting a John O'Farrell novel, which on paper at least would seem to be a very BBC sort of project, while the Beeb are busy giving us Hope Springs, a new Sunday night comedy-drama hybrid thingy from those smashing folk at Shed Productions, home of quintessentially old-school ITV telly such as Bad Girls and Footie Wives.

Of course, the fact that Hope Springs is silly beyond belief shouldn't matter a jot - indeed in these capable hands I'd consider it an asset - but enjoyment of the story of four female ex-cons whose final heist goes so wrong (a stolen diamond necklace is never going to be a girl's best friend) that instead of boarding a plane to Barbados with a few million quid, they end up on the lam in a small Highland village (which may or may not be adjacent to Monarch of the Glen's Glenbogle but apparently shares its inhabitants) is seriously hampered by further casting dementia in the form of another yeasty spread of an actress, Alex Kingston.

I came to Krod Mandoon (BBC2) cold, as it were, which is probably the best way to come... Oh, grow up! But don't bother doing so before you watch Krod, which is a sitcom of inordinate silliness aimed at sofa-bound bonding pairs of, I assume, teenage boys who have outgrown Little Britain and their dads who loved Red Dwarf.

Krod is an amusingly needy-but-buff hero (a smartly cast Sean Maguire) battling Matt Lucas, the evil Dongalor, who wears fur and is into beheading and all the usual power-crazed stuff you get in the kind of magic kingdom that's a few Hobbits short of Middle-Earth. The only completely baffling - apart from everything that's meant to be baffling, obviously - thing about Krod is why there was an hour of it, even for an opener, when no sitcom in TV history has sustained comedy for 60 consecutive minutes.

The Observer Review

I don't know if it's just me, but this kind of stuff, which might have provided a bit of light relief six months ago, now seems awkwardly out of step with these difficult times.

A confession, for I have clearly sinned - if only critically: I've never reviewed Gavin and Stacey for the simple reason that I am not as in love with it as everybody else seems to be but don't hate it enough to rustle up any vitriol either.

There is nothing less interesting to write about than something a bit ho-hum, so-so, quite-nice-if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing, so I ignored it - but after a successful, nay acclaimed, and multi-award-winning first series, it's back and therefore more difficult to ignore.

The humour is Royle Family-lite with moments of Kath and Kimness and occasional forays into the uncomfortable conversational cul-de-sacs trademarked by Gervais and Marchant, which is why I ignored it the first time: everything felt second-hand. It made me smile and there is a genuine sweetness about the relationships which is cockle-warming. I'm just not a big fan of warm cockles.