Tonight

Challenging Radio 4's satirical stalwarts The Now Show and The News Quiz must be an intimidating prospect. However, impressionist Rory Bremner has been given the chance to go toe-to-toe with Toksvig and Co with the return of his late-night topical satire series.

The programme includes Bremner quizzing a number of "informed guest commentators", offering the incisive satirist the chance to prove he is so much more than a one-line impressions jukebox.

You'd imagine that Rory Bremner, fresh from his defeat on Strictly, would be able to show the young pups how it's done. His satirical news show Tonight is stand-up of sorts, in that it's performed in front of a live audience, and Bremner, who has been doing radio comedy since time began, could surely do this kind of thing in his sleep. In the event, it's possible that he was asleep. I never tire of his supplicating Tony Blair or his irascible Prince Philip, but then we had to endure lame 'Allo 'Allo!-style skits about sexual shenanigans between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. Tellingly, the biggest giggle came via his interviewee Michael Williams, the former UN special co-ordinator to the Middle East, who absently remarked: "I've seen more people asleep in the UN Security Council than in the House of Lords library."

I love Rory Bremner. There are sterling comedy writers on his team here. Yet almost every joke ends in a dismally predictable pay-off. As satire on events political and financial it's too angry to hits its marks, as caricature of people in the public eye it is so obviously moulded to fit Bremner's repertoire that Gordon Brown turns up more regularly here than he has in real life for a whole year. I try to imagine Radio 4 Controller Gwyneth Williams sitting by her radio and laughing her socks off, this comedy slot having been her idea. That picture won't come. Alas.

Rory Bremner's new show, Tonight, is aiming to satirise a week's worth of politics. I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, the line between politics and satire is more blurred than ever, so politics has hardly happened before it's a sketch and it's impossible to sound either daring or cutting edge. On the other hand, it's about time Radio 4 had something other than the kneejerk sniping of The News Quiz. Bremner settled for being amusing. Or as he put it, "printing more jokes and then quantitatively easing them into the show. We're not doing this to be popular, we're doing it for ordinary men and women who exist on one decent chuckle in the week." Note to the Conservative leadership. I'm not sure how this will focus group, but Rory only needed to use the words "Boris Johnson" to get the single biggest laugh of the night.

Rory Bremner is back doing what he does best: responding to the news with his sharpest set of satirical teeth firmly attached.

The show is recorded the night before broadcast, so there is no way of predicting what or who the subject matter might be, but he has promised to stick to his mantra that "it's as important to make sense out of things as it is to make fun of them".

To this end, he is including incisive interviews alongside his political swipes and promises a special guest each week.

Tonight with Rory Bremner

Rory Bremner's new Radio 4 series Tonight starts at 11pm tonight. Recorded last night it features topical satire, stand-up and sketch giving an alternative take on what's happening in the news.

Rory Bremner comes home to radio, hosting this new series which combines topical satire, sketches, stand-up routines, impressions and the kind of investigative parody he made his own on Channel 4 in the darkest days of Blairism. Some fellow satirists mock him for earnestness, self-righteousness. I think they might just be a bit jealous of his powers of observation and mimicry. He's assisted here by comedian and writer Andy Zaltzman and impressionist Kate O'Sullivan. The show is to be repeated in the dodgy 7.15pm Sunday slot, which rather challenges its title.