A verse of Cole Porter’s song “Be a Clown” (written for the 1948 film The Pirate) 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 (BBC1 Monday), 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 (and still extraordinary) 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.

Miranda has sunk an inheritance into a joke shop, with a flat above the shop in which she lives, alone. The staff is a severe friend who bullies her; she meets two other women friends with whom she was at boarding school, who are size 10 and engaged and whom she cannot stand but cannot break away from; and she has a smart and ruthless mother who schemes relentlessly to have her married. The object of her lust, Gary, a chef, may be interested or may just want to be friends: part of the comedy is the mismatching of signals in an age where the rules of sexual engagement are fluid.

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 is not the only oasis: The Thick of It (BBC2 Saturday) has a third season running. The foul-mouthed misanthrope, which is what writer Armando Ianucci has constructed as a comic monster from an image of Alastair Campbell, former director of communications to Tony Blair, now has a new victim, minister Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front). She has four kids and a businessman husband, is neurotic, desperate for affection and approval, happy to blame everyone else for her mistakes – and is a media disaster waiting for its moment.

Peter Capaldi, who plays spin-doctor Malcolm, is the linchpin here, with his gaunt face – most terrible when smiling – and his conviction that all around him are guilty until their innocence is brought to him on a plate. And his terror, too – which is that of one who understands the ruthlessness of media that no longer care for fairness in their dealings or for policy in their coverage, but, like a piranha shoal, drift here and there until blood is in the water, when they swarm. This past week’s episode, which featured a mishandled attempt to co-opt a campaigning widow, was aired at the same time as Gordon Brown was pilloried in The Sun for his spelling mistakes in a letter of condolence to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. Though the pillorying was, initially at least, joined in by the BBC, its sheer nastiness prompted many Sun readers to cry foul. The Thick of It has a solid base, but Capaldi is its on-screen genius.

As is – to spot another oasis – Ben Miller in Armstrong and Miller (BBC1 Friday), though he and Alexander Armstrong work well together. It’s an old-fashioned sketch show – a less glitzy, more satirical Morecambe & Wise – and Miller’s deadpan stare and perfect timing make the sketches (which vary in comedic quality) work.

Enough comedy. In Collision (Monday-Friday), ITV1 offered tragedy for five nights. The product of Anthony Horowitz, a prolific writer perhaps best known for children’s thrillers, it was a spare and finely paced five-hour drama that took a motorway pile-up and, through the agency of an emotionally shaken detective (Douglas Henshall), unwound the characters whose fates had brought them violently together in the smash. The complexity of each of the stories was plotted with intensity and clarity: ITV has been wary of following other channels in making a one-a-night drama, but if it can produce one of this quality, it should continue.

Spooks (BBC1 Wednesday) goes deeper into madness; to adapt Wilde, one must have nerves of steel to watch it without laughing, as evil would-be warmongers get their comeuppance, as Sir Harry gets his emotions out for the girls and as the CIA liaison woman falls into bed (again: they did this in the second series) with the most handsome Spook. Let it roll on forever.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd