While Radio 4 has been churning out unrelentingly poor attempts to find any other format than the increasingly tired (and HIGNFY-spawning) News Quiz, television has admitted defeat in the face of the Friday night stalwart. While certainly funny, and occasionally essential, perhaps the programme’s greatest achievement has been to rewrite a nation’s definition of the word “satire”. Merely by dint it being recorded the day before broadcast, it has ensured any expectations of Swiftian anger or Chris Morris’ venom are replaced by the desire to hear jokes about stuff that has happened recently. Topicality is the new satire, and we’re poorer for it.

If any further proof were needed, it comes from the sudden appearance of two new attempts to mimic the formula. Channel 4′s 8 Out of 10 Cats, and BBC 2′s Mock the Week, both attempt to validate their own conceits through the short time between their recording and broadcast. And hope that that’s enough.

8 Out of 10 Cats bases its premise on the mistaken belief that opinion polls are of the zeitgeist, and so we will be riveted by their potential for topicality. Of course, the reason why everyone is so conscious of opinion polls at the moment is the gestalt has finally had their fill of them, their unanimous presence as irritating as an amphibious ringtone. Enough ludicrous election predictions and meaningless surveys occupying desperate front pages mean our cynicism is complete, and our belief that the thoughts of 1000 people might reflect those of 60 million entirely shattered.

As Mark Steel points out, opinion polls are immediately prejudiced merely by means of only being able to survey those stupid enough not to avoid the people conducting them. Oh, and it’s hosted by the Tony Slattery for the new millennium, Jimmy Carr – a man who not only looks like he’s been repeatedly smacked in the face with a spade, but also consistently confirms that he deserves it.

A project of Endemol, 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.

Of course, 8 Out of 10 Cats isn’t entirely stupid for having done this. The four rounds of HIGNFY are the results of 15 years’ refining – and they work. Coupled with the extremely wise choice of Sean Lock as a team captain (very probably the funniest stand up working in Britain), and consistently strong guests (with the very noticeable exception of Tara-Palmer-Bumpkinson – awkwardly ignored by the rest as she squawked her confused nonsense, and spoiled much), it manages to be like enough other stuff that’s good to maintain some credibility of its own. While relying heavily on reliable guest panelists like Sue Perkins or Paul Kaye, inspired choices like Peter Seronovich, and brave risks like Richard Madeley, allow it to get away with the blandness of the other regular captain, Dave Spikey. In fact, it’s in Spikey that the curtain is pulled too far aside and the levers and cogs of stand-up standards are revealed – news stories are used as springboards for clearly well-worn routines that had their day years ago, presumably when they were originally written.

So despite the flawed foundations, the programme’s success and failure relies on the quality of the material stacked on top, and thus in the viewer’s ability to tolerate television’s MRSA, smug-faced Jimmy Carr. The trick is to replay his well-written lines in your own mind, mentally removing the raised eyebrows and faux-sarcasm. Or to hit him with a spade.

Sadly such a forgiving tolerance is rendered impossible by Angst Production’s Mock the Week. It’s quite troubling that in the last 17 years, Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson haven’t managed to come up with a new idea. Painfully similar to their successful project of the 1980s and ’90s, Whose Line is it Anyway?, Mock the Week is an uncomfortably muddled mess of ideas by people who are clearly too busy counting their money to come up with anything original.

While 8 Out of 10 Cats is lazy in its implementation of current affairs, it at least generates material based on those stories, if occasionally awkwardly disappearing down the over-trodden pathways of previously abandoned material. Mock the Week walks down this pathway, takes a seat, and refuses to move. Hosted by potential Deayton replacement on HIGNFY (and presumably being watched very carefully by Hat Trick on this), Dara O’Briain, and captained by Rory Bremner and the far less known Frankie Boyle, it reveals its lack of confidence in itself merely by the seating arrangement. Mirroring the peculiar confusion of latter series of Shooting Stars, where the contract-bound Ulrika Johnson remained ever-present despite having been replaced by Johnny Vegas, the nauseating Hugh Dennis appears to be situated opposite Bremner, yet not receiving the honour on the credits. Dennis’ current ubiquity is inexplicable. Despite Radio 4′s The Now Show becoming increasingly horrendous with every clawingly poor series, work appears to be pouring in for The Mary Whitehouse Experience‘s second least funny star. It comes as no surprise that his partner-in-criminally bad comedy, Steve Punt, appears as a “Programme Associate” on the show’s credit roll.

Mock the Week achieves something quite impressive – it manages to get every toe-curling feature of panel-based programming into one half hour show. Including …

Over-reliance on the concept: Like early HIGNFY, too many overly-complicated rounds pollute everything, with strained requirements that the guests move over to the “performance area”, in order to replicate Whose Line‘s “World’s Worst Step” round, but with the added messiness of being required to walk about six steps up to a central microphone. With only four contestants on Whose Line … who only had to step forward, clashes were frequent. Here, as six stand-ups vie for the right to make the awkward walk, you cringe as they force in front of each other (so much so that Jo Brand physically pushed the dominating Rory Bremner out of the way).

Thinly disguised scripted material: Pre-preparing scripts for panel games is discussed by the tabloid press as if a matter of terrible conspiracy. In reality, it’s what we should be wanting. Genuinely off-the-cuff performances tend to be awful, while pleasantly linked crafted content makes for great TV. What doesn’t, however, is creating a great show of pretending you’re thinking of your tight routine on the spot. It’s ghastly (as anyone who’s listened to Tim Brooke-Taylor on Radio 4′s heavily scripted I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue will attest). Adding in an “Er, how about …” before your line on the page makes you look stupid, and us feel embarrassed at the obvious deception. Done poorly, this is horrible enough. Done when in the guise of standard improvisation games, it’s grotesque. This is never worse than when some actual improvisation accidentally creeps in. During one “bit” between Bremner and Dennis, Dennis throws in a not particularly worthwhile curveball, Bremner giggles, panics, attempts to remember where he was, and then actually says, “Oh yes!” before offering the next feedline. Shameful.

And finally, a complete lack of anything topical to say, whatsoever: If it weren’t for the occasional comments about the week’s most over-mentioned story, you could believe the programme was pre-recorded months ago. Chosen topics are vague beyond comprehension – one round asking contestants to tell a joke on a news story of the week gave the subject matter, “Education”. And where 8 Out of 10 Cats occasionally faltered, Mock the Week exists – top notch comedians like Jeremy Hardy and Linda Smith go off into the same routine you’ve already heard them do on their own radio shows, The News Quiz, QI, HIGNFY, and any number of other “dead material” programmes.

It’s quite astonishing that a Carr-fronted, gimmick-ridden Endemol effort should come out on top of a production by Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson, starring the likes of Mark Steel and Linda Smith. But Mock the Week‘s hopeless bastard child of improv and current affairs should have been aborted at the pilot, or at least put on extended hold until it figured out what the hell it wants to be. 8 Out of 10 Cats will probably never receive another series, Carr moving on to present 37 other projects a week, but it at least manages that slightly appealing, if not long-lasting, style that saw the likes of If I Ruled the World through its run.

Meanwhile, HIGNFY remains unthreatened on its faux-satirical throne, despite thoroughly meriting a challenge from something far more willing to bite chunks out of the week’s news. However, so long as any who attempt to do nothing other than recycle old formats, or indeed to copy it outright, it will maintain its status for a long time to come.

The Daily Show is certainly the finest satirical comedy on television anywhere in the world. It would be nice to suggest it beats all the competition without trying, but the sad reality is that there just isn’t much else out there. Producing four 22 minute editions a week, it generates remarkably well written and vitriolic comment on the day’s news, the day it happens, and manages this in an acerbic and intelligent way despite the increasingly constrictive FCC rules imposed upon America’s cable channels. This is largely due to the behemothic talent of presenter and lead writer Jon Stewart. Before his appointment, The Daily Show muddled along, concentrating on the soft targets of celebrity debacles. Stewart’s arrival – bringing a combination of intellect, knowledge and cruelly sharp wits – transformed the content, driving its direction toward politics and, in contrast to everything else on American television, international news.

Marcus Brigstock is one of those comedians the BBC want to keep, but aren’t quite sure what to do with. Like Johnny Vegas, they’re hoping if they throw him against the walls of enough programmes, he’ll eventually stick to something. His Radio 4 presence has secured some small success, with a second series of his silly-but-affable Giles Wembley Goes Off finishing recently, and a regular position as The Only One Who’s Halfway Funny on The Now Show, serving to highlight quite how much Punt and Dennis need to go away forever. His stand-up routed ranting delivery generates a pace and energy that suits topical complaining, and is most likely to score laughs when he demonstrates a genuine passion for the subject. He’s well educated, and his anger tends to be backed up by a tangible depth of knowledge. You can see producer Bill Dare’s (also responsible for creating The Now Show, and Dead Ringers) thinking when putting him in the host’s chair. And while reading out the scripted topical jokes to camera, it looks like the right choice. From a large team of writers, you can hear both Brigstock and David Quantick’s writing shining through, and for a BBC programme, the hit-to-miss ratio is impressively high.

Sadly, this all falls apart as soon as someone else enters the studio. The Daily Show sees this happen in two ways: a team of spoof news reporters, and celebrity guests. The Late Edition is making a woeful stab at the former, but interestingly has eschewed the latter in favour of bringing in unlikeable individuals from the week’s news (week one was Stephen Green from the ludicrous Christian Voice, tonight’s was UKIP spokesman Steve Harris), and then bizarre, oddball characters (Stephen Pound, bonkers Labour MP, and very strangely, chief scientist of the failed British Mars probe project, Professor Colin Pillinger). While this relieves the programme of the grinding plugs for films and books that Jon Stewart must work around on The Daily Show, you begin to wonder if that might be preferable viewing over Brigstock’s stumbling panic when realising his script isn’t going to save him. Stephen Green should have been taken to pieces. Indeed, given enough space he would have taken himself to pieces, as displayed by a supremely well-made report on Radio 4′s Today programme the same week. But he wasn’t even challenged, Brigstock not quick enough to come up with the replies that every viewer was surely shouting at their television.

However, these moments shine when compared to the disastrous attempts to mimic the guest reporter segments of its superior brother. The Daily Show has a supporting team of astonishingly fine comics, whose desert-dry wits trigger moments almost comparable to the painful delights Chris Morris was generating before he forgot how to be funny this year. The format of their presence in the studio linking to a pre-recorded film is finely rehearsed and flawless. Finest amongst the team is Samantha Bee, whose specialty is reporting on the most ridiculous local news stories of rivalries and spats as if of international importance. She takes dead-pan to a level previously unseen, viciously cruel as a satirist should be, whether interviewing a politician or the head of a campaign against hair braiding. So when Marcus Brigstock introduces Hils Barker to link her report on “what is the new?”, the comparison is necessary. And disastrous. The report is aimless and makes no attempt to satirise or comment. It wouldn’t have been out of place as a “Press Pack” item on CBBC’s Newsround, interviewing friendly BBC types like Paxman and Sophie Raworth for dull soundbites. This culminates in Barker being questioned by Brigstock about what we’d watched, in which the guest reporter giggles uselessly while the host interrupts her every sentence to say nothing of worth. It becomes enormously uncomfortable to watch, and entirely out of place in the format.

But it never gets worse than during its only deviation from the template, where Brigstock mock-interviews the charisma-free Steve Furst, in a variety of dreadful guises. Were these skits scripted, they would be very poor. But mystifyingly, they attempt to perform them during the interviews, improvising on the responses given by the bewildered guest, and are hapless, hopeless car crashes. Please, please may they drop these soon.

The failings are all the more painful because the programme presents at least some hope. Of all the formats to copy, they chose the right one, but they’ve yet to come to terms with how exceptional Jon Stewart is as a comedian and host, and success is not as simple as plopping in the most available comic they can find. If they are able to admit their limitations, and focus on the gag delivery, this might settle into something worthwhile. But it’s hard to shake the thought that they should probably give up, and install Brigstock as the permanent host of Have I Got News for You where his strengths (and indeed failings) would shine.