10 O'Clock Live

In the radio adverts for 10 o clock live Lauren Laverne quite rightly pointed out that no decent series, I think the word she used was "ground-breaking", has ever been made with four leads. Quite right. Also probably her greatest contribution to the programme. Admittedly I do, and always have, found her extremely annoying due to her poor "comedy" delivery, but nonetheless she has very little to do.

Could say the same of Jimmy Carr, mind you. Does a bit of standup, nothing much. Brooker and Mitchell would be obvious choices for this sort of programme, no doubt. Mitchell is normally thought of as quite intelligent, a sort of poor man's, or middle-class man's, Stephen Fry. Brooker has previously mostly done satire and documentary on TV and the news, therefore making him well-suited to it all. They also went well together on the Big Fat Quiz of the Year a couple of years ago.

The big weakness though is that it's a soft-centred liberal little channel four programme, despite Mitchell saying in one of the other adverts that "the great thing is we're not on the BBC so we don't have to pretend to be unbiased".

Good talk, bad walk. Much too respectful, especially as most of the Tory guests have been total loonatics, the beliefs of the most fanatical Thatcherite and the mannerisms of a plummy country squire who resents not being allowed to hunt peasants now foxes are protected by those evil townies.

In short an uncomfortable compromise between a vanilla news programme and a sketch comedy programme. Can't decide if it wants to be Newsnight or Bremner, Bird and Fortune. And, as you can see from the representatives sitting on both sides of Mitchell during his panel discussions, they are in fact being unbiased.

Mitchell does dominate the whole thing. He does most of the interviews with the guest of the week, runs the panel show, has his own monologue. Brooker gets a monologue, as does Carr (placed at the start of the show so as to be forgotten by the end, in my experience, after which he does little or nothing, although they've recently introduced a very poor Children in Need parody to use him a bit more). Laverne does the links, badly, and occasionally does a VT. Comes across like one of the women on the Daily Show. That's not good, for those who've never seen it.

Also loses points for inviting the idiot who wrote Freakonomics on, going so far as to call him a revolutionary thinker and "genius". It even took two fo them to interview him, although that could be because Laverne fancied him, certainly she was the main proponent of the flattery. Who'd have thought writing a book based on a demonstrably untrue explanation of the economics of drink container shapes would be so profitable. Earned a lot of money of it. And, should he ever meet me, a kick up the arse.