In an era of copy-cat shows (I’m looking at you, ITV) and more food and lifestyle shows than anyone could possible keep up with, any channel and production team attempting a new format is absolutely to be applauded. And a nightly comedy show looking at the news, recorded a few hours before transmission, is a rare beast indeed here in the UK.

As I said in my Set The Video post, BBC Four have tried it relatively successfully with The Late Edition, but that is a very left-wing, Guardian-reading affair (mainly, you presume, down to the sensibilities of the of the presenter Marcus Brigstocke), appealing mainly to people who are already interested in the news, so it is especially laudable that Tonightly is aimed at Channel 4′s usual, young, Friday night audience.

At first, however, I had mixed feelings. Jason Manford is a confident host who has clearly been ready to front a show for some time, and confidence is certainly needed when delivering long monologues to camera as Manford is required to do for much of the first half of the show. He wasn’t helped, unfortunately, by a strangely subdued audience, and while co-presenter Andi Osho’s little ad-libbed asides were funny, it seems that she needs to have a bit more faith in herself to believe that that’s the case. I was also slightly perturbed by the fact that there was an A-Team reference and a piece about Big Brother within the first few minutes, as this suggested that the show was going to pander to its target audience, rather than challenging it a little.

*But* things picked up very quickly, and I was especially happy to see that the show worked best when dealing with news stories that were bang up to date. Manford’s list of things that the man cleared of Jill Dando’s murder needs to know now he’s out of jail (Lost goes downhill, Britney’s gone wrong, don’t turn on your gas unless you really need it) was great fun, and the best joke came out of that poor beached whale’s plight. He imagined the phone call to the fire brigade: “There’s a whale stuck in a field” “[beat] Is it on fire?”

As for the new comedians that this show, as a part of the Generation Next season, is meant to promote, the skits were hit and miss. But then that goes with the territory – even the daddy of the genre, The Daily Show, has to deal with the fact that not all of its contributors are as uniformly brilliant as John Oliver, say, or Demetri Martin. Steve Lipschitz’s report, for example, about all foods being dangerous was a pitch-perfect parody of those ridiculously intense reports with far too many graphics that you get on rolling news channels, but it has to be said that it was short on jokes.

Overall, this was a confident start to a project that I was admittedly predisposed to support. As long as the show really engages with whatever’s in the newspapers, adds a bit of bite to the satire, (as one of our commenters has already suggested) and doesn’t get tempted into retreating into the relatively safe environment of celebrity culture too often, then I’ll be happy to follow the rest of Tonightly’s 16-night run.