Paul Connolly (I)

Tis the season to be jolly. But not even the ­prospect of wallowing in a bath of mince pies and brandy could make me feel charitable about Accidental Farmer.

Ashley Jensen, so excellent in Ricky Gervais's Extras and Ugly Betty, has hit the buffers hard with this pitiful affair, which has no ­original DNA and not much in the way of comedy, drama or believability.

Jensen - playing Erin the high-flying ad executive who decides she wants a family only to find a naked woman in her ­boyfriend's wardrobe - exerts revenge by buying a farm with her ex's credit card. As you do. Less likely still, she decides she wants to be a farmer.

Cue scriptwriter cliche hell. There was just one good line. When discussing what to name a pig, a child pipes up with: 'Peter Andre?' That elicited a snort. From me, not the pig.

Frankie Boyle needs barring. I'd hope we'd seen the last of this unpleasant comic when he left the BBC's Mock The Week but, no, up he popped this week on Channel 4 with Frankie Boyle's ­Tramadol Nights, a new show mixing stand-up with sketches. It was awful. Boyle's big idea is to be as nasty as possible to as many people as possible.

Wow, Frankie, that's never been done before. American comedian Bill Hicks founded that particular style back in the late Eighties. But he was slightly different to Boyle - he was occasionally funny.

Boyle, however, mistakes outrage for humour and just ends up coming across like an attention-seeking ­simpleton. An attention-seeking ­simpleton with a silly ginger beard. Does that offend you, Frankie?

Given the extraordinary amount of swearing in The Morgana Show, it's a little difficult to recommend it.

Worse, a lot of the first in this new series from comedian Morgana ­Robinson was short on original humour. However, her take on vapid TV presenter Fearne Cotton was extraordinarily good and almost worth wading through the dross for. Watching Fearne being fired from a cannon was certainly the TV highlight of my week.

Miranda really shouldn't work. If it were any more mired in Seventies sitcom cliches it would feature Terry Scott and June Whitfield in a shop called Grace Brothers.

It's also terribly blighted by awful canned laughter and comedy signposts probably visible from Mars. Yet, despite all this, Miranda is occasionally very funny indeed. This is mostly down to Miranda Hart's bravery. How many 6ft 1in women would write a scene in which they're running down the road in ill-fitting underwear and flesh-cloured tights?

It's Hart's heart that makes Miranda so endearing. And because she falls over a lot and is oddly reminiscent of Frankie Howerd.

The first in this second series sees her trying to get over the departure of her improbably handsome boyfriend by becoming the type of woman 'who just grabs a wheatgerm smoothie in between work and going out because that's enough to keep her going even though she went for a jog at lunchtime - and enjoyed it.' At this point mum (Patricia Hodge) pipes up: 'Darling, I'm putting on a whites wash - if your pants are dirty, pop them off and I'll pop them in.' Miranda shouldn't work but somehow it does.

Nearly always it's the quiet ones that surprise you with their anger. Terry Pratchett's delightful series of surreal Discworld novels have long bewitched readers. Pratchett novels have always acted as gentle satires of our world, but Going Postal, the latest of his novels to be filmed by Sky was, by Pratchett's standards at least, monumentally angry.

Porcine bankers, the celebration of corporations, the moral vacuity of the concept of victimless crime and, er, the incorrect use of apostrophes, were all fed into the novel that was the source for this Sky adaptation. The anger was mollified for family viewing - but only slightly.

David Suchet, almost unrecognisable as a villain who resembled an ageing, heavy metal star, played Reacher Gilt - the rapacious owner of Clacks, a network of semaphore towers which are Discworld's take on the internet.

This was a man who had taken advantage of a banking crisis to move in and steal Clacks from its inventor. Gilt was enraged when the patrician Lord Vetinari (Charles Dance) pardoned conman Moist von Lipwig (Richard Coyle) on the understanding he revive the Discworld's postal service to provide some competition to Clacks.

Part of the glory of this fabulous chunk of entertainment was that Sky eschewed CGI in favour of lavish sets, constructed with lashings of sparkling invention. Going Postal looked amazing. Luckily, everything else about the production was dazzling too.

Coyle was roguish but sympathetic, and Andrew Sachs, as his assistant, bumbled along like a cross between his Fawlty Towers duffer Manuel and the original grandfather from Only Fools And Horses. Claire Foy, as Adora Dearhart, smouldered convincingly.

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