Comedy news: SSP TV Blog: The comedy panel show is dead, long live Infomania

In a world stuffed with ever more banal forms of comedy panel shows, Andrew Mickel breathes an online sigh of relief as he enjoy U.S. show Infomania's fresh take on satirising the news

Is there a more tired format on British telly than the satirical panel show? There's a reason that old episodes get so readily repeated on Dave: they're the same jokes every week.

Start with a round about the Tories or Labour doing badly in the polls, prefacing some jokes about David Cameron being posh or Alistair Darling having funny eyebrows; Andy Parsons stiltedly tells a joke that did the rounds online about three months ago; a questionable survey discovers people in Scotland are more likely to be vegetarians; a token light-hearted story about a cat from Cheshire who eats cheese; applause applause, job done. That's 'the establishment' served its ass on a plate for the week, apparently. 

It was a sorry state of affairs when Russell Howard's Good News on BBC Three proved popular enough to get two more series commissioned, despite having exactly the same sort of half-heartedly vicious jokes as its terrestrial brethren only with a heartwarming video of a kitten at the end in some misguided attempt to call itself upbeat.

Too much stuff happens in the public eye these days to cover such a predictable agenda at such a slow pace, and until someone makes the Thick of It on a weekly basis, no regular British satire show seems to have grasped that yet. So where else can you go? One made-up word: Infomania. 

This is perhaps the point where you will see that it is a web-based TV show and give up on the idea, but hold on to your hats: this is a web show with production values. The presenters have clear skin and ironed shirts. The graphics flash and swoop like a Japanese news bulletin. And above all else, the jokes are actually funny. Actual, laugh-out-loud funny, putting the LOL into LOLSATIRE. Just because this show successfully maps the online world as well it does the offline one, it doesn't mean that it has to look like a YouTube video.

It also goes blisteringly fast, managing to pack in about eight times as many jokes as the average episode of the Daily Show. Now, I'm pulling a mild sleight of hand here: Infomania isn't supposed to be a news-based show, really, as it also packs in everything from music to magazines, and claiming it is supposed to be satirical is also a bit of a stretch.

But it still manages to get more in about actual news and media – from how the US healthcare debate is being framed, to the quietly shocking ways that women and gay people http://current.com/items/92121385_thats-gay-ac-kalypse-now.htm get portrayed on television – than any other programme currently manages.

Three major downsides: It's probably best known for Target: Women  (“Yoghurt: the official food of women!”) which is barely ever on anymore. Then there is the programme deadweight in the form of Ben Hoffman, the programme's own Andy Parsons. And lastly, this is American, albeit far less US-centric than one might think.

Still, if it's a choice between this and another set of jokes about how Scottish Gordon Brown is from Scotland, I know what I'll be watching...

New episodes of Infomania are available on Friday mornings on current.com/infomania and Current TV, Fridays, 10pm.

Postscript
I forgot to say that the barely-remembered The Comic Side of 7 Days  was the best thing that BBC Three ever commissioned and if they'd bring back then British news satire would be single-handedly saved.