The series that’s forever going to be referred to as “the new Nationwide” is back, possibly forever, on BBC1. Since that trial run last year, it’s got a new title sequence, a new – horrendous – theme tune and a new location, in a nice though rather echoey studio in London. There’s also no Nadia Sawalha, but hopes that the great Adrian Chiles would be co-ordinating the whole thing himself have been stymied as, at the last minute, Myleene Klass has been promoted from reporter to co-host. I’m not sure why, as she’s about to pop a sprog so she’ll only be on the sofa for a few weeks.

What hasn’t changed, though, is, alas, the same problem as affected the first attempt – basically, what’s the point? Features on the first show included tips on badger watching and a look at the Orkneys – both entertaining enough, but they looked like they’d just fallen out of Springwatch and Coast respectively. An item on second homes did at least have the bonus of a live link and some chat with “property developer” Martin Roberts (who’s got a bit dull since he used to review adventure holidays on The 8.15 From Manchester), but there was no reason for it to be on the programme on that day of any days or for any of it to be live. What we’ve basically got are all the programmes that used to be on at 7pm – the docusoaps, the nature shows, the consumer series – but now in 10 minute chunks.

Alright, so it isn’t Nationwide, and since that venerable series ended, most of what it used to do has now become a part of The Six O’Clock News - it’s no longer the case that the news is just a straight read of the headlines while any analysis or background is officially “current affairs” and the two never met. But that surely doesn’t mean that The One Show can’t be topical and a bit more relevant?

So let’s get Gordon Brown on answering questions from members of the public. Let’s give someone flooded out in Hull a camcorder to make a diary. Let’s find out how much it cost to stage the Tour de France in London. Let’s have Gabby Logan in on Friday to preview the weekend’s sport. Let’s have an alternative look at a big story that the news doesn’t have the time or inclination to cover.

Let’s just have something that would make anyone happily sit through that theme tune.

For a long time BBC1 has needed a programme like The One Show to anchor its sprawling, incoherent early evening schedules. But that’s precisely the problem. A programme like The One Show would be perfect. A programme that is The One Show, well, that’s another matter entirely.

Admittedly it would help if the series didn’t seek to define itself by way of a promise it then fails to deliver. At the top of tonight’s show co-host Nadia Sawalha assured us we were about to see “all sorts of stories about people like you”. In reality we got nothing of the sort, and instead sat through, in turn, footage of the elite helicopter lifeguard service at work off the south coast; former cricketer Phil Tufnell challenging us to guess his location and win a prize; BBC news presenter Bill Turnbull embarking on an experimental course of power sleeping; Kate Humble seeing if she had the guts to pick up a red-eyed devil crab; and a chat with Honor Blackman.

As fine as most of these features were – and make no mistake, Tufnell aside, they were all avowedly entertaining items – none of them could, by any stretch, said to be stories about “people like you”. Sure, it makes sense, especially treading on such hallowed ground as after-dinner doing-the-pots TV, to march forward behind a mission statement that sounds snappy and rolls off even the most unsubtle of tongues, but it doesn’t make sense to have that motto so disingenuous as to prove, on this occasion, to be totally false. It didn’t feel fraudulent so much as, well, a bit silly. And if there’s one thing that even the involvement of our fellow co-host Adrian Chiles can’t excuse, it’s silliness.

Other editions have witnessed ordinary folk telling ordinary tales, but never to the exclusion of a celebrity escapade or two, and always seemingly included in spite of rather than because of the point of the format. If this uneasy marriage of the everyday and the extraordinary were better resolved, you sense The One Show might be able to relax a bit more, kick off its shoes, let its guard down and – as is human nature for us all at the end of the working day – stop existing on other people’s terms.

And if it had a pair of hosts that were equally capable and convincing, that existence would become all the more affable and, it has to be said, a fair sight more dignified.

In tonight’s show Adrian’s louche turns of phrase and avuncular charm sat horribly alongside Nadia’s non-strategic giggles and a proclivity for ill-timed shouting. Poorly disguised moments of bristling and bridling surfaced all too often. After yet another loaded comment slipped effortlessly from Adrian’s mouth, you couldn’t help but start to wonder what kind of relationship the pair had off camera, if indeed they had any relationship at all.

Matters came to a head in a tart exchange over the business of introducing a challengingly-titled expert. “Nadia has been practicing his name all afternoon,” chided Adrian. “Don’t you just love him?” Nadia cackled through gritted teeth.

Casting against type or marrying diametrically opposing personalities behind a desk or on a couch might pay dividends purely as a novelty late night on a Friday on Channel 4, but only ever proffers embarrassment any other time of the day – and that’s embarrassment on everyone’s part, both the viewer and the performer. Does nobody remember the icy wastes that swirled around David Frost and Anna Ford on the TV-am sofa, or, more recently, the artless union of Terry Wogan and Gaby Roslin on five?

“As usual, we begin with an apology,” cracked Adrian after the programme’s devoutly and depressingly non-memorable title sequence (no theme tune, no graphics, no pictures of our hosts, nothing). 50% of The One Show is coated in self-deprecation; the other half, sadly, sports the garb of a party guest who never knows when to shut up. Adrian supplies the former, as is to be expected, and indeed to be welcomed. But because of the latter, his platitudes fall like bricks upon the wasteground of the studio floor, thudding despondently amidst the screeching of his co-host’s inappropriate retorts.

Geography is also a problem. At least Nationwide, whose name this programme never invokes, perhaps unwisely (it’s rather childish pretending such an illustrious forebear never existed), lived up to its name and covered stories from the four corners of the United Kingdom. Yet on each occasion this reviewer has seen The One Show, including tonight, the items have hailed exclusively from south of a line running between The Wash and The Severn.

Quite probably this isn’t always the case, but for such a pointedly out-and-about, “down your way”-esque proposition, to not even have one item from the north – the north of anywhere – in every edition seems utterly incongruous.

All of these problems could be fixed. All of the niggles and absurdities and wrinkles self-evident in The One Show could be removed, and you’d hope there would be people in the BBC who’d be inclined to do so. After all, the basic premise of the series is sound and one half of its presenting team is perfect.

Why, then, is it hard to fight the feeling that such action won’t come to pass and this four-week pilot will only presage more of the same when, and if, the series returns to our screens? For much the same reason, in truth, that the programme arrived on air in the state that it has, replete with inbuilt flaws, pre-packaged miscasting and a whole slew of mixed messages.

Half right isn’t all right and never should be. Yet you can’t help concluding the same logic that inspired the hiring of Nadia Sawalha in the first place is precisely the same logic that will dictate, come the moment the format is deemed worthy of a refresh before relaunch, it is her rather than Adrian Chiles who will be kept on.

New Who companion Freema Agyeman was grilled live from Pontypool, from a trailer that looked alarmingly like a 1980s Barratt showhome, in a textbook example of the “what? … sorry … I was just going to ask you” troubled satellite interview. Kate Humble searched for red deer in a piece which relied a lot on whether you go for her head-girl hockey-sticks manner (guess what, I don’t). And finally, a live interview with one of the victims of those drug trials that went wrong, and his new wife. It sounded like a decent scoop, but it never quite revved up (although I’d started flipping by this point).

Adrian Chiles is, as everyone’s been saying, a brilliant presenter, but he is undoubtedly better when there’s something more tangible to work with, such as football analysis, an Apprentice firing or a hapless chief executive to be interrogated on Working Lunch. The presence of Nadia Sawalha put me in mind of too many dire BBC morning shows, usually involving the residents of Albert Square nagging us to stop smoking or something.

It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t exactly feel like vital viewing, either.

Oh, and the five-minute regional bulletin at 7.25 feels a bit unnecessary, as you just get the same stories they’d recapped half an hour earlier and, in the case of London, a second full regional weather forecast in the space of 30 minutes.

Of course, the main implication of this is a load of badly-written broadsheet features about the original programme, featuring, naturally, the magic words “skateboarding duck”, and the searing revelation that “Frank Bough will not be involved”. Well, thanks for that.

The problem that clueless media journalists always have when seeking to paint Nationwide as a 1970s joke (Clunky sets! Cheesy news agenda!) is that sooner or later, the name Diana Gould rears its head. That nice lady from Cheltenham who put Margaret Thatcher on the spot over the legitimacy of the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War.

That a programme where the public could question the political leaders of the day can be written off so lazily by so many is a crying shame. Nobody ever mentions “Down and Out”, the feature in which Tony Wilkinson slept rough for a month to expose the nightmare of homelessness. Exactly where does that fit into a “cheesy news agenda”? Of course, there was Richard Stilgoe’s “Pigeonhole” and Bob Wellings looking at follies, but that’s what made Nationwide great – 25 minutes of British life, both serious and trivial. Like a newspaper.

I’m not sure that it’s necessarily right for today, though. This exercise seems like a desperate attempt to find something to fill BBC1′s troublesome 7pm slot. And who really needs 90 minutes of news, regional news and current affairs in the early evening? Imagine George Alagiah reading the news, handing to Natasha Kaplinsky in the Nationwide studio, then to “your own programmes”, then back to Natasha again. It could be Sixty Minutes all over again. And there’s the very real prospect of endless irritating Breakfast-style stilted banter.

But still, it’ll be interesting to see how it works out. Especially if they decide to update some of those old Nationwidestaples. For “Pigeonhole” with Stilgoe, read “Inbox” with Bill Turnbull?

Nice though this would be, I wonder if 90 minutes of news is really going to be that appealing every teatime – it worked in the past because both the news and Nationwide had distinct jobs, but now you tend to get on the Six the sort of lengthy reports and features that would have been ‘wide territory. Also, it will surely limit the sort of stuff that can be shown early in the evening, and it seems a bit daft to meddle with the regional news programmes when they’re thrashing ITV.

But it is true that the 7pm slot has always been a weak spot for BBC1, you never know what’s going to be on there and often it can get the evening off to a thoroughly flat note. Rather this than another docusoap, but it’s hard to see it becoming quite the hit it was three decades ago. Would the Consumer Unit drag viewers away from The Woolpack now?