Jennifer Saunders

Your next box set: Jam and Jerusalem

Fetes, fury and neighbourly meddling form the backdrop to Jennifer Saunders' winning sitcom drawn from her experiences of smalltown life on Dartmoor.

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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.