8 Out Of 10 Cats

8 Out of 10 Cats, the hit-and-miss quiz show hosted by Jimmy Carr at his most smugly slappable, returns for a new run. Of the team captains, Sean Lock is always good value ("All these hurricanes hitting New Orleans proves my theory that God hates jazz") but the guests can often be a rum bunch, with soap stars and vapid T4 presenters appearing alongside the comic talent.

If they conducted a national poll to find which panel show the public thought best bridged the gap between Have I Got News For You and Family Fortunes, this would be the hands-down winner.

Host Jimmy Carr returns to deadpan his way through an eighth series of more current affair-based quipping.

The show's traditional opening round to try and guess which headlines have been exercising the public jawbones this week should be pretty easy. And you can bet team captains Sean Lock and Jason Manford have spent the week happily polishing ad-libbed one-liners about Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle's meltdown, The Apprentice and the Big Brother launch.

As with HIGNFY, the only flaw in this format is that the panelists then have to patiently EXPLAIN these hot topics to us as though we've just recently touched down from Mars. "She was this woman with bushy eyebrows who lived with her cat in a village in Scotland and then she became the most famous woman in the world and it all went a bit wrong..."

Chipping in with their two-pence worth this week will be Johnny Vegas, Ulrika Jonsson, Jodie Kidd (not known for her rapid-fire humour, but she may surprise us) and Jack Whitehall, who'll be secretly hoping that the nation will be talking of nothing other than what a shame it is he won't be hosting Big Brother's Big Mouth this year.

One of the nice spin-off benefits of Big Brother's return is that this splendid panel game, hosted by Jimmy Carr, also takes up its traditional place alongside it on a Friday night. Rival captains Sean Lock and Jason Manford, plus celeb guests, speculate as to the outcome of various weird surveys.

New series of the topical quiz show - that's so hot C4 would only send us a preview disc to get here on Monday. Presumably because it is so topical it is filmed after it's shown. It's funnier than it has any real right to be, because of Jimmy Carr's well crafted one-liners, Jason Manford's likeable nature and Sean Lock's occasional bursts of genius. The guests tonight are the posh 12-year-old comic Jack Whitehall, who did a nice line in flirting with Ken Livingstone last time he was on and Johnny Vegas, who we saw trawling around a north London bookshop last week looking rather svelte.