Russell Brand

This panel show began its forty-first series this week, and as usual it features a lot of things that we're all familiar with: Ian Hislop's in-depth political knowledge, Paul Merton's extraordinary improvisational abilities, a biased scoring system and rubbish but amusing pictures to keep the cost of making the show down.

Typically there were some good moments in this episode, hosted by Jack Dee, like Hislop's gag about Obama supplying light sabres to the rebels.

However, much of what was covered has already been featured in other programmes like last week's edition of Russell Howard's Good News, including the house that looked like Hitler, the Michael Jackson statue and Wayne Rooney's swearing. While the move back to Friday will no doubt please many viewers it does mean that other satirical comedies get to the stories first, so in a way it feels like the jokes are being repeated. Then again, they do cover some stories with more depth than other shows, so they get points for that.

The main problem that I have with HIGNFY - and indeed most satirical comedy shows - is that very often the jokes are just too lazy. All they have to do is find a single oddity about a person and they will keep making the same jokes about that person forever, or until they find an even better oddity.

We saw the same jokes tottered out again: Russell Brand and Silvio Berlusconi are lecherous; Sarah Palin is stupid yet sexually appealing; Eric Pickles is fat and so on. I loathe this lazy writing, especially the fat gags. For around 15 years we have had to listen to the same old jokes about John Prescott being fat and grumpy, and now that he has gone we're going to have to listen to the same gags again, but now with a different target.

Of course the thing you have to remember is that now we have a Tory government in power, so satire should be easier anyway. I have my own personal theory about satire, which is that there is always a satire boom in comedy whenever a right-wing government is in power.

In the 1940s, Charlie Chaplin made The Great Dictator, probably his greatest film. In the early 1960s you had the satire boom under Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home with shows like Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was, which soon fell after Harold Wilson came to power in the late 1960s. In the 1980s you had the alternative comedy boom and Spitting Image. In the 1990s Drop the Dead Donkey and HIGNFY began during Thatcher's final days, with Spitting Image finishing the year before Blair came to power and DDTD finishing the year after. In the 2000s, America had shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report under George W. Bush. The only problem is that no-one was expecting the Lib Dems to come into play.

Still, HIGNFY is enjoyable. It's not going to bring down the government. Mind you, with the Conservatives in power, would they want all that good material going to waste?

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