Lucy Mangan

It is the season of goodwill, I am aware. So, let us place all necessary aides for attaining this desirable state within easy reach - mulled wine, mince pie, Quality Street highlights of your choice - and muster all the warm festive glow we can before turning to Accidental Farmer (BBC1). This was an hour-long comedy drama, the pilot for a potential series, about an urban sophisticate, who, after finding a young, naked lady crouching in her boyfriend's wardrobe when she returns early from work, goes on a drunken online spending spree with his credit card and buys a rundown farm. Narked by the howls of derision that greet the idea of her keeping the farm and becoming a farmer, she decides to... keep the farm and become a farmer.

On the upside, it stars Ashley Jensen, an actor whose chops and comic timing have been famously and repeatedly proven in international hits such as Ugly Betty and Extras. On the downside, her innate warmth and permanently anxious, vulnerable air make her an odd choice to play Erin, a hard-edged advertising executive. More importantly, even the best comic actor needs decent set-ups and lines to keep a comedy drama together, and Accidental Farmer plodded through a series of sub-Cold Comfort Farm/Darling Buds of May cliches slower than a Gloucester Old Spot through mud.

See Erin climb over fences wearing impractical high-heeled shoes on her first trip to Appley Farm (a name indicative of such a dearth of imagination that it should have sent up warning flares in the minds of any early script reader - I'm sorry, another orange crunch please)! Watch her gaze in horror and whip out the sanitising hand gel as protection against the honest, Yorkshire muck around her! See yokels discover she is single and assume she is a lesbian! And finally, yes, watch her - whoa, whoa, whoops, there she goes! - fall into a giant mud patch.

There's also a sitting, spitting tenant - octogenarian Olive - to deal with, a dishy vet (whom she at first mistakes for a doctor, can you believe?!) and a doctor who has secret, dastardly plans to buy the farm and turn it into a hotel. But I suspect, by this point, you probably knew that.

With a lot of work on the script and a lot more mince pies and mulled wine thrown down my gullet, it might have the potential for a cosy Darling Buds of - nyygh - Appley Farm-type Sunday teatime offering. But as it stands, it was a comedy drama without an awful lot of either.

The writing and performances remain brilliant, the stupidity of Jez agonising, the agony of Mark exquisite. This week, Jeremy joined a band as a sax player ("I can't play the sax but it's basically like a giant kazoo") and got a job with the man who was in a coma last week and whose girlfriend he is planning to steal ("I'll juggle them until it all blows up in my stupid face"), while Mark divided his time between looking after his baby son, pursuing - and at last, it seems, landing - Dobby and playing Cybermen vs Roosevelt with Gerard after a weak moment in a model shop. Jeremy finds them role-playing and mocks. But how is what they're doing any different from Jez's Xboxing, Mark argues. "I'm sorry that, in an infantilised world, I have ended up with the uncool toys." Oh Mark. It is your constant drive to iron out the inconsistencies in this frustrating adventure we call life that makes us love you. Please let it be so with Dobby too, forevermore.

Miranda (BBC2), back for a second series, is as gloriously daft as Accused was dour. Gary, the love interest, has gone to Hong Kong and Miranda is bent on reinvention. She will become one of those women who wear skirts and have fruit bowls that don't contain three-week-old rotting pears because "they actually eat the fruit!" After getting stuck on the local sushi bar's conveyor belt, curtseying to and farting in front of the new chef it dawns on her with the palpable sense of horrified wonder in which Hart specialises that "The new me is currently substantially worse than the old me." It is solid, heartening fare and I nearly laughed my leg off.

A little light relief was on hand from a new series of Misfits, the tale of five teenagers on community service who are getting to grips with the superpowers given to them by a freak electrical storm. Nathan - whose gift of immortality was only revealed to us and him at the end of season one, when he woke up in coffin - was overheard obtaining a little manual relief by Kelly (who can read minds that are six feet underground if the - um - expression is intense enough) and unearthed. This was to the great relief of claustrophobics, if not to the rest of the group who do, after all, now have to deal with him again. If there's one thing cockier than Nathan, it's an immortal Nathan.

After that, things pelted along at an exhilarating pace. There's a shapeshifter, a shadowy watcher, a new probation officer vying with the kids for the 2010 Disaffection Award, a light sprinkling of sex and drugs and, by the end, a couple of dead bodies. Misfits still has its revivifying mix of wit and energy, along with a measure of grittiness that keeps it from spinning off into Heroes-like cartoonishness or Skins-like smugness. The cast are all excellent, but Lauren Socha's Kelly is a perfect portrait of a genuinely unhappy teenager, an endlessly, magnificently pulsing mass of insecurities and hostility. Iwan Rheon as Simon breaks your heart even as he's pulling murdered probation officers out of the freezer - a misfit even among misfits. Bold and brilliant stuff.

Trinny and Susannah: From Boom to Bust (Channel 4) was the online spoof documentary about the fashion duo's attempts to relaunch themselves on the makeover market, retooled for the ancient medium of television. After Nigella, it looked like cinema verite.

It is a fairly gentle send-up of their respective personalities and collective public image. Susannah is an erratic boozehound - her long-suffering PA Gemma habitually has to run after her with forgotten items. "Susannah - phone! Lighter! Fags! PANTS!" - while Trinny is the more practical half, delivering intense speeches to camera while having a bum massage.

There were many nice touches. At meetings with commissioning editors, Gok Wan ("You know, that Chinese woman") is cited every time. Their new agent, Toby, brings along the clothes he wants them to use for makeovers: "I picked a few things out. How hard can it be?" It wasn't brilliant, but it was much, much better than it could have been, even allowing for the fact that the pleasure in watching Trinny and Susannah has always been that while they always took their tasks seriously (hence the spasms of frustration they endured in changing rooms up and down the land as recalcitrant, Widdecombe-shaped women refused to try on anything other than box pleats), they took themselves seriously not at all. All in all, a splendid palate cleanser after the heavily larded nonsense of Nigella.

Ideal, the tale of shut-in drug dealer Moz (Johnny Vegas) began its sixth series last night with Moz apparently being decapitated by PC Phil. From there, things unfolded with their usual skill, with Vegas's beautiful, idiosyncratic brand of melancholic comedy infusing everything. It now comes with added Sean Lock - as Brian's ex- and now transgendered wife. Rich, dark and satisfying as best plum cake.

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