Clive Anderson

This Radio 4 show moved to BBC4 earlier in the year, and now gets a terrestrial repeat on Friday nights. The format is simple: take a good-for-a-chuckle celeb (eg Clive Anderson, Esther Rantzen) and film them as they try a new experience. Tonight Nigel Havers tells Marcus Brigstocke what it's like to watch The Simpsons, get a tattoo and listen to The Smiths for the first time . . . As far as R4 banter-comedy goes, it's not bad. File alongside, if not necessarily in, Room 101.

This new series from the Comedy Connections people has a rather misleading title.

Despite the efforts of presenter Clive Anderson and three other scriptwriters to find the funny side of different TV formats this is a fairly straight run-through.

It would certainly benefit from less of Clive's awkward links and more of what we really want to see, the clips which cover all the bases from an ancient show called Top Town right through to today's The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent and John Sergeant doing his Stiffly Come Dancing thing.

Among the gems tonight is ex-Corrie actress Debra Stephenson doing impressions of judges Amanda Holden, Cheryl Cole and Dannii Minogue.

And Les Dennis reveals that the clapometer on Opportunity Knocks was operated by a couple of prop men pushing a lever to pretty much wherever they liked. A generation is collectively gutted.

Radio Head: David Mitchell

The Unbelievable Truth, for instance, should never have been recommissioned. It's only funny when Clive Anderson is speaking. They could more profitably devise a show that was just Clive Anderson, speaking.

Its failures as a quiz are admirably demonstrated by the fact that the scoring is now inverse to the drollery, so that Clive scores no points at all, and Lucy Porter sometimes wins. I don't care about scoring when it's like I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and it's meant to mean nothing, but they can't all be spoof game-shows. Some of them have to be actual games that work.

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, it is now possible to watch Radio 4 on the television. Not by tuning in to digital channel 704, where one can listen to the Today programme while watching a soulless blank screen, but by watching BBC4, where insufferable self-satisfied discussion programmes have taken on a new and horrific visual form. Your genial host: the bourgeois Frankenstein* Marcus Brigstocke, whose approach to off-the-cuff conversation is to count silently inside his strange elongated cylinder of a head until his guest has shut up, before stomping in with the leaden tread of an asphalt welder to deliver a series of scripted quips.

And when it comes to smug, middle-class chat shows, the half-arsed format is king. Here, they're never sure whether to point and mock (John Humphrys has never had coffee from Starbucks!!!!! Can you imagine!!!!) or to trawl the depths in search of slapstick (Clive Anderson, if you can credit it, has never once in his life practised judo!!!! How humorous). Perhaps, with a Brigstockean constipated sneer, it should be renamed Never Seen Room 101.

BBC Radio 4 comedy I've Never Seen Star Wars transferred to television recently, presented by Marcus Brigstocke - a stand-up comedian who resembles a geography teacher, and who's apparently determined to find fame by appearing on every British satirical show in existence.

INSSW is a variant of Room 101, where a weekly celebrity guest must talk amusingly about a certain topic. In the aforementioned series, it was pet hates; in this show it's things they've never experienced, but wish they had. Of course, a proviso is that each guest gets to plug the gaps in their life-experience beforehand, then relate everything to Brigstocke.

It's a show that clearly relies on its guests and their choices to amuse. I don't hate Clive Anderson, but it's difficult to remember why he was a fairly big star back in the '90s, despite the fact his enduring legacy is being bumbling while hosting Whose Line Is It Anyway. His wit has long since been exposed as relying solely on daft word-play, too. His choices here were uninspiring and not particularly strong to deconstruct for comedy. What humour can you mine from the revelation someone hasn't seen Withnail & I until very recently, let's be honest.

I've heard a few episodes of the Radio 4 series in my time, and that sounded much sillier and comically distended than anything here - recently, Sandi Toksvig admitted she's never eaten a Pot Noodle, and was promptly heard cooking and eating one in comic detail as if it were an epicurean delicacy. There was nothing to equal that amusement in two episodes of the TV version, despite the assumed a visual medium should bring.

Take Room 101 and rip it off with a slight twist, and you're left with I've Never Seen Star Wars. Based around the simple concept of giving celebrities cultural experiences that they've yet to experience and seeing if they enjoy it, this was fairly amusing - though that may be because Marcus Brigstocke's first guest was the witty Clive Anderson.

The programme in which Marcus Brigstocke cajoles some famous faces to do something they've never done before or actively avoided - he forced Barry Cryer to watch an episode of Friends and Joan Bakewell to have a beatboxing lesson - leaps off the radio and on to the small screen. Tongiht's first episode sees Clive Anderson broaden his cultural horizons.

The early-evening Radio 4 comedy in which Marcus Brigstocke encourages celebrities to venture outside their comfort zones transfers to TV, with Clive Anderson the first to try five fresh cultural experiences. The former barrister had not been recorded throwing caution to the wind at the time of going to press, but we're promised few changes to the programme's original format. Recently we've heard Phill Jupitus eating his first Findus crispy pancake, Joan Bakewell getting a beat-boxing lesson and Barry Cryer changing a baby's nappy - the result being an enjoyably less-splenetic version of Room 101, in which the guests do sometimes find pleasure in the very things they've been avoiding.

Sometimes it's comforting - in a way - to get back to comedy the way it used to be made by well educated middle-class males. Here, Marcus Brigstocke takes his radio show asking guests to sample new experiences. First up is Clive Anderson who watches Withnail and I, does the National Lottery, learns judo, reads Men Are From Mars Women are from Venus, and tries to relax in a floatation chamber. It's all quite jolly, it makes you smile, then it's over. At no point does it make you want to kick your TV screen in, which given this week's other attempts at comedy - even Comic Relief will have to go some to be less funny that the shambolic nastiness of Horne And Corden - is quite a feat.

Armando Iannucci's radio show is a bit of a teeth-clencher... let's examine the components.

It's a sort of chat show, with three guests, except they aren't allowed to chat. They are there to make jokes on topics, presumably of which they have had notice, chosen to reflect the week's events. On Friday these included national holidays (Get Carter Day, suggested Will Smith, to rare studio audience silence), unlikely headlines (E.coli has entered the Big Brother house, offered Iannucci), David Cameron choosing a Benny Hill song on Desert Island Discs (here Natalie Haynes began talking, bafflingly, about shoes), who in public life you would like to kill and why (Clive Anderson pointed out that killing people is wrong, but Will Smith insisted that he still wants to kill Alan Rothwell for stealing his Action Man, the one with a parachute).

Iannucci joined in competitively and did solo riffs on why he hates Apple (his iPod froze) and his local gym. Croquet figured largely, of course, so largely that on Saturday, after the repeat, the weatherman said it would be a wonderful afternoon for it if the subject hadn't already been malleted to death.

Could it be that none of Iannucci's guests had spent enough time thinking what to say? Is it possible that Iannucci himself, back in 1990, when he was putting together the genuinely revolutionary On the Hour (and sweeping aside the News Quiz team waiting to get into the studio after him), would have allowed this show on air? I doubt it.

I think he's bored with the news and with radio. He's exhausted. He's had an exceptionally busy and productive year. Another, during which he will also set up the BBC's new comedy workshop, lies ahead. He has given energy and intelligence to some truly major work. Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive is, alas, the dregs.