Why Miranda is not guilty of misogyny

Sometimes you can time a backlash to the minute. Have you had a good year or two? Has a critical mass of uncritical people – let's call them normal TV-viewing members of the British public – decided that you are A Good Thing? Has your autobiography sold well? Then an attack on you and your work is more than due. Step forward, Miranda Hart, and get what's coming to you.

The first episode proper (if you don't count the Christmas special) of her new series – Miranda – has led several critics, in a national newspaper and on Twitter, to accuse Hart of misogyny and self-loathing. This is on the grounds that most of the humour in the show is derived from her own physical and moral failings instead of … well, I don't know exactly. Blackly humorous insights into the financial crisis? World hunger? The Jimmy Savile inquiry? Who knows what would satisfy the currently discomfited.

Perhaps it would help to understand that Miranda is a comedy and, like most comedies, based on failure rather than success. Miranda the confident, high-achieving consultant neurosurgeon (or Del Boy the successful businessman; or a peaceable, happily married Basil Fawlty) would be many things, but funny wouldn't be one of them. Miranda does use the fact that she is tall and not conventionally attractive, but she also does pratfalls, says stupid things and blows biscuits into her mouth with a hairdryer. All are fuelled by the search for laughs, not the expression of self-hatred. If wringing a gag out of her mannish frame is offensive to women, then digestives and snowmen should lodge a class action against the Biscuit Blizzard.

You could go further and argue that the show is the exact opposite of misogynistic. The mad confidence of the actor and the character is a tonic when compared to the anaemic, cramped comedic (and dramatic) female roles out there. Miranda also stands out in a televisual world in which it is still vanishingly rare (especially since Smack the Pony ended, which was its first modern mainstream sighting) to see women being, and being allowed to be, purely silly; galumphing around, doing daft walks and generally playing a fool in almost the old-fashioned sense of the word.

The fact that Hart has created, writes and stars in her own show on her own terms should be celebrated, loudly and lengthily, not scoured for faults. And 2013 should be the year we insist on a minimum requirement before offence can be taken. Miranda's so-called misogyny does not even register on the scale.