The Now Show

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis may be names that TV viewers vaguely remember from The Jasper Carrot Show, but radio fans know just how good they are at dissecting the news with clinical precision. If BBC 1's Have I Got News For You is a blunt instrument, then Radio 4's The Now Show is the delicate scalpel of a heart transplant.

The format is pretty steady, with Punt and Dennis opening and closing the show, firing at a bucket load of targets and dropping in a number of running jokes for the dedicated listener (keep your ears open for a Donald Pleasance Great Escape 'I can see perfectly'). Alongside them are comedians Jon Holmes and Marcus Bridgestock, the former answering readers 'letters and emails,' while Bridgestock has a polemic that makes him the closest the UK has to Ketih Olberman. And then there's Mitch Benn, the comedy collossus with a guitar, putting the week's highlights to music.

Welcome back, my friends, to the sequence of news-based satire programmes that seemingly never ends. After six weeks of The News Quiz, we now have six of The Now Show, which will doubtless give way to Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive and thence to The News Quiz again in the spring. Perhaps Radio 4 thinks that life is hard enough at the moment without shocking us with the new at the end of a hard week. And, to be fair, the last series of The Now Show was something of a comeback to form, with the credit crunch, the re-emergence of Peter Mandelson and the sheer otherworldliness of Sarah Palin providing plenty of grist to the mill for Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis, Marcus Brigstocke, Jon Holmes, Laura Shavin and Mitch Benn.