10 O'Clock Live

Dear anyone (including Mark Lawson in the Guardian!) who is criticising last night's 10 O'Clock Live for having "a liberal agenda" (by which, given the strong anti-bank-bonusses, anti-free-market-of-universities tone, I'd suspect they mean liberal in the sense dominant in US political discourse, ie, a generic pejorative closer in meaning to 'socialist') - well of course it bloody does. That is because, given our current dominant political and media narratives, to satirise from the right they would need to have Nick Griffin as a presenter.

There are plenty of things to criticise the show for:

• it's 2011, do we really need three blokes to do the talking while the girl wears a pretty dress, lots of mascara, and giggles? Even her one (pre-recorded) comedy segment apparently needed a random guy in it.
• Jimmy Carr appeared to have nicked all his jokes off Twitter - oh well, I guess it was better than letting him ad-lib..
• Far too much sexist humour around Sarah Palin - "whining harridan", "I still would", "the only horseman of the apocalypse it is possible to maintain an erection while looking into the eyes of"
• why were all the interview segments cut short just when they started to bite?

But as a Thing That Should Exist, especially if we do end up with some kind of SkyFox news in the UK, I think it's laudable - I just really hope that they learn from the flaws in this episode, and get better, otherwise it will always be seen as a poor imitation of The Daily Show. And I really, really hope that they don't just dumb down from here, turning Brooker and Mitchell into the next generation's Graham Norton and Jonathon Ross.. I don't think my poor heart could stand it.