Miranda

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.

Miranda Hart is very tall and, from certain angles, looks a bit like a man. That's not me talking, that's the set-up for Miranda, a sitcom that feels like it's been beamed in from the 1970s in which the titular heroine makes jokes about her height and being mistaken for a bloke. There are times when you don't know whether to laugh or cry, but not in a good way.

That's a little unfair. Any show that contains the line "I look like I've had a chiffon-based anaphylactic shock" (Miranda had donned a super-sized wedding frock) is not entirely without merit. So credit where it's due: there were more laughs in last night's opening episode than in the entire series of Lunch Monkeys, Home Time and Mumbai Calling put together. Faint praise, admittedly. Still, that's as good as it gets.

For anyone tuning in hoping for some edgy 'kraut Queen' jokes would have been sadly disillusioned. Chocolate penises (penii?) was as risque as it got, which is fine if you find cacao-based genitalia intrinsically amusing. If not you had to suck on a lot of knowing asides to camera and the gauche charms of Miranda which, after the umpteenth time she'd gone tongue-tied and bonkers in the presence of her dreamman, wore pretty thin. Miranda is tall and she looks a bit like a man: but that don't make her Rhoda.

On her new sitcom Miranda, Miranda Hart has set herself the difficult job of making an irritating and socially awkward character watchable. She worked hard last night by sub-vocalising her thoughts, talking to camera, showing us fantasy sequences and doing more pratfalls than Lucille Ball. She's funny.

Yet a series based on a young woman's ugliness worries me and so does one predicated on the idea that she must marry. I suppose it is progress that the tall, goofy Hart gets to star at all. In the good old, bad old days, she would be writing for her attractive co-star Sally Phillips. But she, oddly, is currently a radio star.

She's already shared the screen with French and Saunders and had a show on Radio 4, Miranda Hart's Joke Shop. Now comedian Hart has her very own retro sitcom, with a studio audience and a set that looks as if it's made of toughened cardboard. Miranda runs a joke shop with a small blonde, battles with her marriage-obsessed mother and chases dreamy Gary in the restaurant next door. It's a tiring whirl of pratfalls and goofy misunderstandings that's mildly amusing when Hart mocks her own height and extreme klutziness.

Miranda Hart is one of those performers who just exude likeableness. Every time I see her on TV I want her to be my new best friend. Her new sitcom - based on her Radio 2 series Miranda Hart's Joke Shop - trades on her gawkiness and the fact that, at 6ft 1in, she is often mistaken for a man.

Miranda (the on-screen one at least) is so clumsy she makes Bridget Jones look like Sienna Miller. With many of the same cast from the radio show, Miranda's asides to camera and the potential for some great visual gags make this an effortless joy.

The set dressers have let her down massively though. You might be able to get away on the radio with a joke shop that looks like a front room full of pottery and glassware. But on TV, a joke shop should look like a joke shop.

A new star is born. Miranda Hart wins a first full series for her semi-autobiographical sitcom, and it's a real treat. Playing the eponymous lanky, hapless, agoraphobic joke shop owner, the comic clearly has plenty of gag potential, as she fails to impress her Sloane Ranger childhood rival Tilly (Sally Phillips), her over-bearing mum (Patricia Hodge) or the men she sets her cap at. Warm, affectionate, and, best of all, hilarious.

Get ready for Miranda

"Hope you enjoy the show tonight. I can't believe it's going out (this has been years in the coming). My career either takes off or comes to a said end tonight...!"

Miranda Hart and Patricia Hodge drive this amusing rather than funny sitcom. Somehow, we like it more than we should. Give it a try.

Miranda Hart, aka the dozy cleaner out of Lee Mack and Tim Vine's one-liner-thon Not Going Out, gets her own sitcom, in which she runs a joke shop - badly - and fawns over the sexy chef in the restaurant next door - badly. At first, the humour is all a bit trouser-round-the-ankles obvious but once the fabulous Sally Philips turns up as one of Miranda's toff school friends, the high levels of daffiness bludgeon us into submission.

Miranda Hart (and Saunders, Smack the Pony, Not Going Out) has finally moved off the fringes and been given her own sitcom - a spin-off from her Sony-nominated Radio 2 show. Set in a joke shop, this is classic misfit comedy with a mildly surreal edge, and Hart's painfully self-deprecating humour is very funny in places.