Gordon Brown (I)

Chris Addison, the comedian who plays the weedy Ollie Reeder in The Thick of It, has been given his own topical news show on Five Live, 7 Day Sunday.

As usual, there is a certain amount of "category error" in this choice. As Ollie in The Thick of It, Addison is hilariously funny, but this is because his lines are written by the comic genius Armando Iannucci. On 7 Day Sunday, however, Addison is writing his own lines, assisted by a studio gang who would laugh at a pig's bladder on a stick. On The Thick of It there is snappy dialogue at a thousand miles an hour, but if you talk like that on radio without enough jokes or substance then the listener's mind skitters all over the place trying to concentrate, before giving up. The show's brief was to "pull apart the week's big news stories", but in the event the only news covered was snow. Weirdly for someone who made his name in a political satire there wasn't any. Why not? The Gordon Brown coup should have provided acres of material, but it took ages to get round to, and then got a paltry two minutes.

As with all the other new shows, I feel strongly that one should not judge on the basis of a debut. Addison is witty and will certainly improve when he starts to take things a little slower. But unless he cracks down on the nervous giggling, his team will still sound like they're stuck in a small lift, supplied with nitrous oxide instead of oxygen.

In Michael Frayn's classic novel about Fleet Street, Towards the End of the Morning (1967), there is a memorable hack who rivals a sloth, doing no work from one week's end to the next. Alistair Beaton, once a speechwriter for Gordon Brown, is writing in the same tradition but satirising a new era. Electric Ink - about a newspaper's struggle to go digital - cannot compete with Frayn's genius but made me laugh none the less.

I was aware, too, of the serious question underlying the mirth: whose side are we on? Do we support Maddox (played with magisterial pomposity by Robert Lindsay), a vain, old-school hack who has just written a long (and, according to his news editor, "tedious") piece about a radical Muslim cleric? Or do we back charming twentysomething Freddy (a hilarious Ben Willbond), who speaks in a vivaciously streetwise way and turns out to be an Etonian trying to live down his education?

Freddy is new-media-savvy while Maddox sneers at the phrase "embracing the digital age", maintaining that a handshake is as far as he is prepared to go. Yet, at the end of the first round (with five to follow), it is Maddox - to my astonishment - who, in his stubborn, devious, old-fashioned way, seems to be winning.

Ever the investigative journalist, he discovers that Freddy's story on a new plague ("Generalised Affective Social Stress Disorder") is as bogus as its author - not worth the screen it is printed on.

A new three-part series from Rory Bremner, John Bird and John Fortune focuses first on the economic recovery, or lack of it, as well as looking askance at Gordon Brown's frightening smile and the "Sachsgate" affair. This was recorded in advance of the full horror of the MPs' expenses scandal; that will no doubt be explored in future weeks.

5 Live's controller risks playing it for laughs

The funny stuff will arrive in time for the festive season, a series of "Christmas treats", as Van Klaveren terms them. Parsons will be making a show called PMQ, in which he will play the Speaker and guests have to respond to given situations as if they were Gordon Brown, only in a humorous way. The controller hopes it will become a current affairs equivalent of Colin Murray's successful Fighting Talk, "which works brilliantly in terms of sport, but what we haven't got is a vehicle which is as strong in terms of news and topical events".

Satire! It's great. Except for when it's not, obviously. Then it's rubbish. That Have I Got News For You manages consistently to avoid the potholes routinely occupied by its contemporaries (to wit: crudeness, the triumphs of ego over comedic esprit de corps, Jason Manford, etc) is testament not only to the chemistry between long-serving team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, but to wit so sublime it can turn a one-liner on Gordon Brown's incisors into a dazzling nugget of incontrovertible topical wisdom.

Returning as the show's guest host tonight is This Morning's astonishingly game/foolhardy Fern Britton. Place your bets now on how many seconds will elapse before Paul Merton mentions g*stric b*nds.

Well, on first viewing Headcases is halfway there. Gone are the brilliantly OTT rubber puppets that made Spitting Image such a hoot, replaced with so-so animation.

But what the caricatures lacked in laughable looks they made up for with gags. The ultra-vain Victoria Beckham serving Steven Spielberg a naff Vienetta while boasting about her movie-star appeal raised a chuckle.

"Chav dames" Helen Mirren and Judi Dench bitching their way around Hollywood was another gem.

The Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty junky characters didn't quite work. But, with a nod to Spitting Image's political past, the pelvis-pumping Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown as Scrooge were inspired.

Worth sticking with.