10 O’Clock Live to return in 2012

Channel Four have announced that 10 O’Clock Live will return for a ten-week run early next year, with a few changes. The satirical live comedy show will continue to be presented by Jimmy Carr, Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell and Lauren Laverne but will now be 15 minutes shorter.

This is great news. The series showed enough promise to deserve a return and it was great to have Brooker’s Newswipe analysis and Mitchell’s Soapbox rants getting a wider airing and the Peep Show star sometimes made for a tougher, more compelling political interviewer than the ones in the Newsnight studio next door, but it was far from perfect, sometimes struggling to pad things out on slow news weeks. It also saw its audience decline over the course of the series, which is why it’s especially good to see Channel Four having the confidence to give it another chance. Moving from one hour to 45 minutes should make for a tighter, sharper programme and producers say they’re keen to make the running order a little more flexible this time around, which should also help as sometimes it suffered from having too rigid a structure.

Hopefully the good parts will stay and the flab will be cut, making for a better, if shorter, programme.

10 O’Clock Live hits the airwaves

Channel Four’s new weekly live topical comedy show launched tonight. 10 O’Clock Live features a mix of monologues, debates and interviews, presented by Jimmy Carr, David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker and Lauren Laverne. As you might have seen, I went to see the pilot last month which you can read about here.

Preview: 10 O’Clock Live

Last night I went to BBC Television Centre to watch the first unbroadcast pilot of 10 O’Clock Live, a new weekly topical comedy show coming to Channel Four in January. Presented by Jimmy Carr, David Mitchell, Lauren Laverne and Charlie Brooker, it follows on from the channel’s irreverent Alternative Election Night coverage earlier in the year.