This week a new TV channel hits your digibox courtesy of Turner Broadcasting System and Nuts magazine publisher IPC Ignite. The director of programming for the production team ETV, Adrian Swift, also worked on Live TV prior to its demise in 1999. So having seen all those adverts for Nuts the magazine, and maybe even read it yourself if you're into the "lads mag" scene (God help you), what would you expect to see on a channel calling itself NutsTV.

Something exclusively laddish, presumably? Maybe a lot of gorgeous young women in various stages of undress, almost certainly pouting suggestively at the cameras and draping themselves over lucky celebrity guests from the world of sport, music and train spotting? If what Adrian Swift says is right, you might be slightly off beam with that interpretation...

Adrian's firmly of the opinion that the time for Live TV's features like Topless Darts has come and gone. It had a huge audience at the time, but in the intervening years men's magazines - whatever you think of them - have flourished and so has a whole new genre of men's channels.

NutsTV has to bring something different to the mix. Swift says: "What we wanted to do was make something that's a little bit like a party every night. Where we've got good guests, interesting people, and we do weird things you won't see in any other places."

The risk with this approach is that sometimes it will pay off and sometimes it won't. But that could well add to the channels appeal. Swift adds: "I guess where you'll end up is some of [the weird things] will be a huge hit and some of them people will go 'what was that?' "

NutsTV borrows from the magazine for some content strands while others are completely new. The big departure from the magazine though is that the channel will be much less about boobs and girls than the magazine. "Britain's Fittest Barmaid," says Adrian, "is more of a funny reality show about getting a group of smart, good looking girls to do fun stuff that makes everybody laugh. What we don't have are pictorials of girls or slow, long, languid pans over women with their tops off - the television equivalent of the magazine. We don't do that. We have lots of beautiful women floating about the channel, but they don't take their clothes off."

The channel, like the magazine, is aimed at the marketeers famous 16-24 age range. This in itself gives IPC and ETV a problem: "The big issue is that guys from 16 to 24 can smell a rat a million miles away. They've been brought up on television. They don't fall for any of the tricks or the conceits of television, which we in the industry find so clever. They just want real stuff that makes them laugh, makes them go wow, or grabs their attention."

Swift is certain this is a good time to launch the channel, even in the face of falling circulations for men's mags. Since men in this age group spread their attention across many platforms - print, TV, internet and mobile - it's important to have a presence in each. He believes "everyone" likes the Nuts brand but only a small proportion of these "fans" actually buy the magazine. By opening up another channel (literally) for consumers of the Nuts style of entertainment, Swift is hoping they will reach a whole host of people that they wouldn't normally talk to.

Utilising the best of modern multimedia technology and putting the output out live every night will allow the channel to be more interactive than ever before. "Send us a clip or we'll ask you to vote on something," says Swift. "You can win a prize, but its all resolved in the show as you watch it. Because it's live, it all happens there and then." The show can take video from mobiles or from the internet and have it on air within 15 minutes of it being sent. This can be a double-edged sword though and Swift is conscious that a lot of poor user-generated-content may turn viewers off. He still believes that much of the material will be used though. Returning to the principle of doing a lot of weird stuff only some of which will work he thinks the mixture of user content that will be shown will still be "kind of interesting" even if a lot of it is crap.

Which makes me wonder if he really understands his audience as well as he thinks. Personally I can see a large group of 16-24-year-olds sitting through endless hours of terrible home-grown stuff just to find the nugget in the pile of horse dung. They've already got YouTube for that. It sounds like an abdication of production responsibility to me, which should really be filtering the input and showing the good bits, rather than dumping it all at us and asking us to take the rough with the smooth.

You'll be able to decide for yourselves soon enough though. NutsTV launches on Freeview channel 42 at 9pm on Wednesday September 12. [via DS]