10 O'Clock Live - Telly Talk

Week two of Channel Four's new satirical show, a sort of cross between Newsnight and the Daily Show, but with slightly more unnecessary F-words than Paxo and co usually offer, and still the jury's out.

It's neither brilliant nor terrible, but sort in the middle; a bit 'meh' then, probably accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders.

True, there are some good jokes, with Jimmy Carr's opening summary of the week's news a high point. On the continuing debate over control orders and the restrictions that stop suspected terrorists from going out at night, he suggested that lawmakers had confused terrorists with vampires. It's very stressful for some would-be terrorists, he warned. "Some are suicidal."

But the trouble with the programme is that it takes material like this and tries to mix it with debates and interviews, and it doesn't quite know how to do it. As a result neither interviews nor debates get enough time, and it doesn't help that David Mitchell (whom I suspect will be joining the cast of EastEnders at some point as it's about the only thing he isn't on these days) appears to be like a rabbit in the headlights until about halfway through, which is when he stops twitching nervously and begins to relax. A pity, then, that his interview with Alistair Campbell, the former Labour spin doctor, came soon after the show began.

Campbell was cool and calm and collected, managing with ease to plug his new book and defend the invasion of Iraq. He came across well - rattling out statistics to back up his argument that the war had been worth the bloodshed. He left his inquisitor looking like an amateur who'd had itching powder tipped into his suit. He doesn't half twitch.

Charlie Brooker was on good form, nicely summarising the Andy Coulson/News of the World phone tapping story ("I don't know about you, but when I've done nothing wrong I like to resign, get another job and then resign again") while Jimmy Carr's discussion of the national debt would have been great had it been given more than a couple of minutes of screen time. "Who do we owe the money to?" he asked an expert. "Is it the banks? Because they can just ... off."

It was the same story for a debate on control orders - three talking heads, one complex subject, roughly four minutes of air time and an audience that whooped and hollered without actually listening to what anyone was saying. And is it just me or was Lauren Laverne a bit underemployed this week? Which is a bit rich considering the programme had the nerve to have a go at sexism in the media.

Still, perhaps by next week those clever men will have found something for the bird to do.