Recently Channel 4 began it’s new series, the 10 O’Clock Show, now running for a few weeks on a Thursday night, in which we meet our rag-tag fighting farting force from the Alternative Election Special which aired last year and promised to be an excellent mix of news and laughter, but alas, what we ended up with something that was borderline a war crime.

One of the main reasons to watch was good old Charlie Brooker, a man who in the past has looked at countless hours of television news and mocked it beyond compare. It appeared that he was sentenced to the naughty step most of the time, perhaps for drawing a penis on his exercise book, while Jimmy Carr labored through jokes so badly written, he’d been better off dangling his keys instead to get a better response.

Lauren Laverne was the lady of the 4, who you may remember from something off the radio, I think, and the bloke off Peep Show and that, wore a suit and thus completed the ensemble.

Despite the amount of crap on that special and of course after being cleared at the Hague, the powers that be or Zeppotron, took it upon themselves to repeat that formula this year, and so with a mixture of news, comments, pre-recorded material and debates with the occasional f**k thrown in, we go on our epic journey into live TV.

But since it’s broadcast last night, it has received mixed reactions that are extreme one way or the other, that you’d be forgiven for thinking that Channel 4 had either given the public a fresh point of view on the news, or just done a sh*t in your mouth.

Now here is where it gets a bit silly as for myself, the show was viewed as a member of the much hated audience and therefore seeing things from the other side of the screen, did offer a different perspective which should be made a little clearer to you in order to understand a couple of the problems which people have either liked or complain horribly about.

The main complaint against the audience, was that we were laughing at pretty much anything we wanted, clapped all the time, did panto bits of ooh and boo at the Conservative MPs who were on and all looked like a bunch of self-satisfied students who would just agree with whatever was said while half-pissed.

Now… unfortunately that’s mainly true.

It’s hard to believe but we were sort of following orders, while also being completely clueless as what was appropriate. One bloke was wandering round the studio and just had just two jobs: to count people in when the adverts were about to finish, and also to start clapping so we knew when to clap.

Even better, during the warm-up phase before the show went on the air, the production team had brought in a stand-up, whose job it was, while ripping the p**s out of people for turning up at all, was simply to wind us up beyond all hooping, as if we were all participating in a western film bar-room brawl.

Instead of allowing us to warm-up ourselves and naturally find humour in the content, we were kind of forced to make a show of it too to ensure it came back next week and perhaps it backfired as a result. As part of the mob, I can only apologise and prey that you don’t make me eat donkey vomit.

Then there were complaints about the actual content of the show. When you start to see what was talked about, it’s not hard to see why.

We were taught how to dodge rioting Tunisians while learning how to ask local people to stop burning our wives, question if we’d sleep with Sarah Palin, which Mr. Brooker pretty much said yes, and wonder if building James Bond Villain hide-outs or Volcanoes were the solution to climate change (go blonde bloke with strange name!). Plus, we basically say bollocks to local news.

Ok, that was fair enough, local news is shit and Mr. Peep Show David Mitchell held his own very well.

While some of the content was quite good, and was presented in a neat fashion, there was one item on the show which died on it’s flabby arse. Lauren Laverne’s WNN segment, which was supposed to liven up news about Sudan by turning it into celeb gossip, complete with American accented tw*ts. There would have been more laughs if they had simply stabbed a puppy.

During one of the ad breaks, after the cast had just come away from sitting at the table as one happy family, Lauren actually seemed to be genuinely worried, and started looking round the audience behind her, and took one look at me, and I actually said “Don’t worry, it’s all good.”, really just trying to reassure her that she wasn’t about to be shot outside like Lassie.

Maybe it did do the trick as when the show ended, and she was leaving, she turned back and said thank you.

Another criticism is that it’s not like the Daily Show. What the hell is the Daily Show? Seriously, unless you had watched on a late night on sky channel 47349828, lived in America or googled it, would you have a clue what it was?

After performing re-con on the enemy like a fat ninja ready to pounce on a plate of beans, it turns out some bloke called Jon Stewart, who with some extra people called “the best fu*king new team ever”, does the same thing across the pond complete with whooping over the top audience (but they are yanks therefore programmed to whoop and cheer at a seconds notice), and is far better.

Slight issue there, the show’s been going over 10 years and this British version is just starting. Bastards! What were they thinking?!?! Let’s just give up now….

Look, at the end of the day, it was a bit rough.

Charlie Brooker always seemed to want to run away from the camera when it was focused on him, a lot of the pre-written jokes were really hit and miss, the debates were in some ways very one-sided and didn’t have enough time to explore further and delve deeper (Suggesting going to University would become a gamble is a non-argument, there are lots of big decisions that are a gamble every day, such as wearing underpants longer than a week, and when was University Education free for everyone? Mr. Mitchell, I took issue with that…).

But despite all that negativity, the show actually did provide some real good moments, and provided there is some tweaking around how much they cram into the hour, the cast take some time to be more comfortable with each other and themselves with the production team shutting the hell up about needing the audience to be whooping and coughing up blood at everything that’s meant to be funny, this could turn out to be a good thing for TV which is normally full of crap about buying property for £700 million or seeing another set of people get rejected by David Hasslehoff by being dancing gimps on Britain’s got Brain Damage.

And we may even get to learn about what’s happening in this bitter world of ours without wanting to kill ourselves afterwards too. Seems like a plan to me.