8 Out Of 10 Cats

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.

8 Out Of 10 Cats always feels like it's going to be terrible - awful set, appalling title sequence, a guest booking policy that seems to be no more sophisticated than get who was funny on Buzzcocks last week, appalling editing that renders half the show inaudible - but it always turns out to be good fun, thanks no doubt to Sean Lock, the best panel game participant in Britain. Nobody, even Paul Merton in his prime, is as good at going off on tangents and gently mocking the sheer pointlessness of news-based satire.

Not a strong return for the comedy panel game which normally scores eight out of ten when it comes to funny bits. More like a four this week.

Jimmy Carr returns with the sixth - yes, sixth - series of this consistently funny panel game, sitting smugly between the announcement of who's getting kicked out of the Big Brother house and the first evictee's chat with Davina.

Comedians Sean Lock and Jason Manford are still in the team captains' chairs and tonight they'll be joined by repeat guests (also known as show stalkers) Vic Reeves and David Walliams, who have appeared more than 10 times between them.

Back tonight on Channel 4 we've got the consistently brilliant 8 Out Of 10 Cats, the comedy panel game hosted by Jimmy Carr.

The inessential comedy panel show returns for an astonishing sixth series, with Jimmy Carr again marshalling six comedians as they recite jokes based on surveys and statistics. Returning as team captains are Sean Lock, generally the best spontaneous contributor by far, and Peter Kay-ish Manchester comic Jason Manford.

It's all a bit stilted and choppily edited, but it can attract decent guests (Vic Reeves and Griff Rhys Jones were on last year - David Walliams appears tonight) and will do well in the ratings.

Deadpan comic Jimmy Carr asks two teams to identify contemporary hot topics and link stats to facts, but this is all a playground for the guests and Carr alike. Perhaps the best feature of this show is the choice of captains: Sean Lock of TV Heaven, Telly Hell and Dave Spikey of Phoenix Nights. Dave makes for a good smart take on the discussion while Sean can be relied upon to offer more risqué humour. It is this trio that ensure the guests are never safe and have made it a ratings winner.

Off the Telly Review

8 Out of 10 Cats could hardly be more derisive. No effort has been made to disguise its wanton copying of the HIGNFY format, complete with variations on the 'newspaper headlines', 'odd one out', and 'missing word' rounds, concealed by the tissue-thin excuses of survey results. Asked to guess the five most talked about subjects by their pollees, it's embarrassingly obvious that the charade is entirely unnecessary, and they may as well be asked questions on the week's news and be done with it.