Ian Hislop

The satirical news-based panel game has been running since 1990 and is now in its 40th series. The first guest host to face the crossfire from Paul Merton and Ian Hislop is the Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch; later in the series, Jeremy Clarkson and Martin Clunes will take the chair. The first guests to join them tonight are writer and presenter Victoria Coren and comedian Jon Richardson. We can also expect to see James Blunt, Nick Robinson and Ross Noble later in the series.

There are touches of brilliance in Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse's latest series. Everyone will have their favourite sketches but the plummy old men in a gentlemen's club discussing which famous people are "quare" are the highlight for me. "If he sounds like a quare and he looks like a quare I should think he's a probable quare," they concur. This week Ian Hislop and, shockingly, David Attenborough are up for discussion. Not all the sketches work so well, but for fans there's good news: Café Polski is back in all its sad glory.

Sir David Frost, sometimes dubbed "the godfather of satire", talks about the impact of this particular type of humour on politics in the UK and the US. Using clips from That Was the Week that Was and America's Saturday Night Live, Frost shows how the genre has changed and garners the opinions of satire veterans such as Jon Stewart, Ian Hislop and Rory Bremner.

Ian Hislop puts it well when he says satire's job is to ridicule "vice, folly and humbug". He also argues that it works best when politicians are particularly divisive, hence Spitting Image's success at the height of the Thatcher years and Tina Fey's Sarah Palin in the 2008 American election campaign. It's one of the many good points made in a documentary that makes excellent use of David Frost's cachet on both sides of the Atlantic. So sit through the umpteenth showing of Bernard Levin being punched on TW3 in order to also see some insightful interviews with those who have impersonated our leaders, namely Rory Bremner (Tony Blair), Chevy Chase (Gerald Ford) and Will Ferrell (George W Bush), who all consider the extent to which impressions tarnish the reputations of people in high office.

Why HIGNFY hits the target even after 20 years

When they first appeared on BBC2's risky new show Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop and Paul Merton, aged 29 and 32 respectively, were young, dangerous, and at the cutting edge of television satire.

Private Eye: Audio slideshow

As Private Eye prepared to go to the presses with its last pre-election issue, editor Ian Hislop invited the Today programme to see how the satirical magazine is put together each fortnight.

Take a unique look inside the Eye's offices in central London - as its writers decide which politicians, business leaders and celebrities deserve to be scrutinised and lampooned in the latest edition.

Incredibly, this is the 20th anniversary and the 39th series of the BBC's flagship entertainment programme - the only entertainment programme that is consistently and genuinely entertaining. Paul Merton's unstoppable flow of surreal invention never seems to dry up, while Ian Hislop must be one of the few people on the planet who can appear on television suffering from a burst appendix and still manage to be funny. With an election looming, the big challenge of the new series - according to Richard Wilson, head of comedy at the production company Hat Trick - will be "to take the spectacularly dull things that politicians say and get laughs out of them". The host tonight is Lee Mack, with Alexander Armstrong and Jo Brand booked to appear later in the run.

On a Thursday? Are schedulers messing with our minds? Is this an April fool? Since time immemorial Have I Got News for You has been a fixture of Friday nights, like crowds outside pubs and kebabs on the pavement. It boots us into the weekend with a flurry of vicious wit, surreal satire and cheap jokes at the expense of John Prescott's figure. It's our pressure valve on the end of the working week, allowing the nation to let off steam and laugh at our betters, while wondering where Paul Merton gets his I'm-wearing-this-for-a-joke shirts and noting the steady advance of Ian Hislop's chins. To plant it on a Thursday seems like sacrilege, until you remember that tomorrow is Good Friday, so the weekend sort of starts here. Let's hope series 39, which starts with Lee Mack at the helm, can keep up the standards.

It's series 39 of the topical panel game and tonight's headline is: HIGNFY has transferred from its traditional Friday night to a new Thursday night slot.

HIGNFY might be billed as the comedy quiz that grills celebrity contestants on the week's top news stories, but we all know it's an excuse for team captains Paul Merton and Ian Hislop to make jokes at the expense of everyone else on the show. Stepping up this week are Nigel Farage MEP, former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, and Scottish comedian Kevin Bridges.

Bridges is likely to give as good has he gets. But Farage may find that political barracking is no preparation for the heckling he could get from the HIGNFY team.

The News at Bedtime is a brilliant Today show spoof by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman which went out at Christmas and rather got lost in the nation's annual drowse. Catch up now as John Tweedledum (Jack Dee) and Jim Tweedledee (Peter Capaldi) present the latest from the land of nursery rhymes. It is so funny you can hear each episode five times (thanks to the marvellous iPlayer) and still find new things to laugh at (thanks to producer Simon Nicholls).