I have previously declared my love for Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and sure enough I still catch it when I can on TV, and, more often than not, on their hugely comprehensive website, www.thedailyshow.com. We should give thanks to The Daily Show for giving us the wonderful Steve Carrell (who may have made some duff films, but is wonderful in The Office: An American Workplace), for giving air-time to the genuis stand-up Demetri Martin, and for taking our own John Oliver to the next level. And, of course, another successful alumnus is Mr Stephen Colbert, whose own show, The Colbert Report, had its UK premiere on FX last night...

Unlike Jon Stewart, who essentially appears on The Daily Show as an exaggerated version of himself, Colbert is here playing a character. Clearly parodying the unashamedly biased news anchors on channels such as Fox (and especially Bill O'Reilly), on-screen Colbert is a George Bush-loving, all-American hawkish right-winger. The opening credits feature the good old Bald Eagle, and show Colbert waving the US flag in majestic manner - you instantly know what, and who, is being lampooned.

Already knowing that Colbert plays a character on this show, I was expecting it to be rather more different from The Daily Show than it actually is. In fact, it's a similar format, with monologues and interviews, and, in the end, it has the same left-wing bias, it's just that that is put over to the audience in a slightly different way.

Last night, the best feature by far was The Wørd, which, Wikipedia tells me, appears on the majority of episodes. In this segment, Colbert takes a word or phrase which refers to one of the biggest political issues of the day, and then expands on it - ie rants about it O'Reilly-style with plenty of pointing and posturing. Last night the theme was Free Gas, as Hillary Clinton has just announced that she would give Americans a summer without tax on petrol, to the derision of every economist in the land. Naturally, Colbert thinks that this idea doesn't go far enough, and it would be much better just to give away gas for free. The genius element of this feature is that, while Colbert rants, bullet pointed comments come up on the screen which totally undermine what he's saying. Take a couple of examples:

"One problem, is how will we know when summer is over? It's always summer somewhere"
Soon, always summer everywhere

"My Total Gas Holiday will provide relief from the gas crisis"
When we run out of gas

These asides had me laughing out loud pretty much every time they appeared on the screen - which was a relief, actually, because for the first few minutes I wasn't terribly impressed. One of the problems is that with this, and indeed the Daily Show, you just have to accept that some of the jokes and references will go totally above the heads of us Britons - accept it, and you'll have a much better time.

As I said, then, I was surprised - and perhaps a little disappointed - that this didn't differ from The Daily Show in look and feel quite as much as I'd hoped, but at the same time it's clear that Colbert's a master entertainer, and certainly comes into his own when he gets to improvise. Oh, and he's one hell of a dancer, too - take a look at the video named "Rain Dance-Off" on this page.