Angus Deayton

Now in its 43rd series, amazingly, little has changed since Have I Got News For You was forced to ditch scandal-hit Angus Deayton as host for the successful but problematic "guest host" format. The thinking is that HIGNFY is kept fresh by having different celebs hosting the show every week, Saturday Night Live-style, and that's true to an extent-but it also means you have boring "safe pair of hands" episodes (here Stephen Mangan, usually Alexander Armstrong) more than the truly memorable hosts (like Boris Johnson or Bruce Forsyth). It also irritates me that the show still keeps in the "mistakes" a guest hosts make during the live recording, as if it's still a novelty having a "non-professional" sitting in the hot-seat and a fluffing a line or two. Isn't this the accepted format of the show now? Why are the still showing us what amounts to bloopers in the show itself?

HIGNFY is still incredibly popular and remains an entertaining watch, but I find myself wishing it would be overhauled. Ian Hislop and Paul Merton have been team captains for so long their shtick is fairly predictable, especially in the latter's case with his surreal meanderings. But more worrying than that, if we're honest HIGNFY is a much less perceptive satirical show than its reputation has us believe. If you note the type of jokes that are made off-the-cuff, or the writers have scripted for the guest host to read off the autocue, the majority of them are silly jibes about a particular famous person's public persona or physical looks. (Politician Eric Pickles is a particular target these days, just because he's fat. I guess Pickles is John Prescott's replacement because they've had the ex-Deputy PM on the show and now we know he's actually a straight-thinking and amusing man.)

Obviously not every joke can be a vividly perceptive gem that tackles the hot issues of the day in a fresh way, but I get the feeling that HIGNFY has less and less to say of real merit these days. It's like everyone who appears on it just follows the pattern they've seen play out hundreds of times, afraid or just unable to take the show down a different path. Why not alter some of the rounds, ditch some of the weaker ones, or bring in a few new ideas? For instance, why is there still a "guest publication" in the Missing Words round? Wasn't that a one-series joke that never got retired? Its weekly inclusion just removes the opportunity for a politically-based joke when the missing word has something to do with a niche topic like raisins instead of something topical and of public interest.

It just feels like HIGNFY could do with a facelift, because it's been around for so long that viewers find it comforting (some people have never known a world without HIGNFY, remember!), and treat it with a reverence it perhaps doesn't deserve anymore. It probably helps that there's no admirable challenger out there, with Channel 4's disappointing 10 O'Clock Live and Adrian Chiles' That Sunday Night Show its closest competitors. In comparison to both, HIGNFY remains genius.

The penultimate episode of the amusing comedy drama about two teenagers who meet at a party and find out that 18 year-old Laura (Scarlett Alice Johnson) is pregnant. With three months until the birth, Laura is still living at Jamie's (Sean Michael Verey) house and his parents are keen for her to move back home. Meanwhile, Laura's parents Alan (Angus Deayton) and Janet decide to make a go of their marriage and plan a weekend break away.

Recording diary: New world record

It's a wrap, loves. Angus Deayton was our last guest of the Mr Blue Sky recording.

Another charming episode proves last week's opening part of this new comedy wasn't a one-off. Newly pregnant Laura (Scarlett Alice Johnson) is still grappling with the full consequences of her one-night stand with 16-year-old Jamie (Sean Michael Verey) when her parents (Angus Deayton and Anna Chancellor) find out - in less than ideal circumstances.

The attractiveness of the British teenager may be as hard to detect as the Higgs boson particle, but it doesn't stop TV producers from putting more and more of them before the cameras for our inspection. Following the success of Skins and The Inbetweeners comes Pramface, a comedy of virginity, sex and pregnancy (yes, in that order) among the GCSE-sitting classes, and the discomfiture of their parents.

Sweet-faced but lecherous Jamie (Sean Michael Verey) and his conceited babe-magnet friend Mike (Dylan Edwards) are 16, have just finished their exams and are anxious to crash a party thrown by cooler and more grown-up schoolkids. "There may be scenes of a sexual nature," confides Mike, who wears green shirts with Harry Hill collars, sprays Lynx in his underpants and has made a shag-along soundtrack on his iPhone that ends with the theme to Top Gear. Elsewhere, pretty, 18-year-old A-leveller Laura (Scarlett Alice Johnson) has been grounded for smoking dope. She has a turn of phrase that shocks her anxious parents, Anna Chancellor and Angus Deayton: "It's not as if you found me snorting coke or straddling my pimp"; "To you the world's just one big fucking naughty step isn't it?" Naturally she escapes the prison of home by falling out of the window and at the posh party she drunkenly kisses Jamie. Minutes later, they are dancing the blanket hornpipe on a leopardskin throw in someone's bedroom, while Jamie's girlfriend Beth attempts to crawl out the door.

Weeks later, along with her A-levels, Laura gets another result: she's pregnant. She has no recollection of her inamorata, only a phone number. When they arrange to meet in a café, she makes for the promising-looking chap sitting by himself, but gets it wrong: the father of her child is the geeky kid at the other table. Oh, no! He's 16, she's 18 - an unbridgeable gap - she has a croissant in the microwave and their young lives are blighted for ever. Or are they?

Chris Reddy dreamt up Pramface and wrote the script, directed by Daniel Zeff. It has nice touches: when Laura rings the number scrawled on a note, to say, "We slept together and now I'm pregnant", she dials the wrong number and her voice is beamed to the phone-speaker of a car driven by a startled bourgeois with his family. But it's all so derivative. Do we need any more jerking-off jokes, orgasm faces, drunk-girl pratfalls? There's a deal too much Americana here too: the plot's straight from Knocked Up; the party scenes of interchangeable babes owe a lot to Beverly Hills 90210; Laura's taut family supper echoes American Beauty. Lacking the rude conviction of The Inbetweeners, it comes over as The Hand-Me-Downers.

At first, this new comedy goes through the motions with a depressing lack of imagination. Its main characters - nice virgin; crass, gawky, showboating virgin; swotty PC girl who secretly loves nice virgin; posh, bright girl who's rebelling against her parents - are archetypes from American films, unaltered. Real teens are a lot more diverse, and funny.

But the title tells you this is a set-up episode. The booze-fuelled fumble in the middle will spawn a baby. Can Pramface step up and grow up? Someone thinks so, because they've splashed out on Anna Chancellor and Angus Deayton as the parents at war. And the young actors are blameless. Pramface could still recover from its inauspicious start.

If this new panel show sounds familiar it's because host Miles Jupp tested the idea in 2011 in a round called What Does My Dad Know? in Angus Deayton's It's Your Round series on Radio 4.

The brief has now expanded beyond questioning his own father to getting three guests to test someone who supposedly knows them well with questions such as "Who would I rather spend an evening with: George Clooney or God?" Des Lynam picks his agent to answer these Mr and Mrs-style questions. Rachel Johnson opts for a girlfriend she met when they were in their 20s. And Mark Steel puts his faith in his teenage son. One couple does very well indeed, another faces predictable embarrassment and there's a duo who might just as well have never met before.

Listen out for a particularly saucy comment from Mr Lynam - his agent certainly wasn't expecting this when she agreed to appear with him.

In Pramface (BBC3) a potentially clunky premise - two teenagers' drunken sex at a party leads to a pregnancy neither is ready for - is saved by cunning casting and a funny script. Sean Verey as 16-year-old father-to-be Jamie has scarcely lost his puppy fat, while as 18-year-old mother-to-be Laura, Scarlett Alice Johnson looks and plays like a young Harriet Walter - as hard as nails in dealing with her convincingly useless parents (Angus Deayton and Anna Chancellor), yet as brittle as pressed flowers with everyone else. I loved Jamie's loser friend's hopeless sex playlist - 50 Cent followed by the Top Gear theme tune. Although Chris Reddy's plot is full of holes (would Laura, after discovering she's pregnant, really make her first phone call to the shag buddy whose face she can't recall?) there is enough in this too-much-too-young comedy's opening episode to justify a second date.

BBC3 wanted a new Gavin & Stacey. All it got was this lousy straight-to-DVD Knocked Up/buttoned-up Inbetweeners/Skins. In attempting to be all things to all viewers, this first episode fails to come close to any of them. Laughs are thin on the ground, and a bedroom wank scene manages to be boring. With some quality cast members - Angus Deayton is a shady father and Submarine's Yasmin Paige is the precocious and lovelorn best friend - we're still hoping Pramface can find its voice.

Angus Deayton: Paul and Ian were paid as much as me

Angus Deayton on sex, scandals and why everybody gets paid too much on TV.