Will viewers want to sit through stand-ups watching soccer?

If you've wandered onto a big satellite broadcaster's many stations recently, you may well have seen ads for a novel new football/comedy hybrid. The set-up is intriguing: comedians hang out together and watch Premier League games in what looks like a regular lounge, but every now and then you'll spot a studio audience looming over the false back wall.

If you happen across a Comedians Watching Football With Friends episode halfway through it can take a few minutes to work out whether there's a fourth wall actually in place: are they all pretending that they're really in Josh's flat, and that a legendary Liverpool FC winger and a former One Show presenter have turned up too? What are the chances? Then the pizzas arrive.

Oddly enough, in a time where we hardly even notice product placement any more, the pizza logos are all covered up - or they've ordered from a random local place (always a gamble). Which seems a missed opportunity. You'd think they could happily slot in a link-up with a popular pizza chain, or the lads could compare the best betting bonuses for UK punters, or even talk phones, cars or new films. Blokes watching football, it's odds-on they'd be discussing this stuff anyway.

But then this isn't a real front room, and it is a slightly odd atmosphere. In fairness, most of us would probably find it hard to relax in front of the telly with a load of random people staring at the backs of our heads. Officially, according to the show title, the comedians are hanging out with their pals - and most comics do tend to know each other - but that aforementioned trio looked like they'd only met five minutes beforehand. Football matches can be quite long when the conversation isn't flowing too well.

Still, it's quite fascinating watching these diverse people interact. Like many new shows these days, you can see the lineage to previous hits. This one was presumably pitched as 'Gogglebox, but with football', but then that hugely popular Channel 4 show owes a lot to Soccer Saturday, in which four old former footballers talk us through the live Saturday games on their screens while former Countdown host Jeff Stelling rattles off stats about which team in League Two hasn't scored for three months.

Meanwhile the bit in the new show where the comedian (pretending to be) in residence goes to the (not real) front door to meet the (presumably fake) pizza delivery guy may well be a nod to Fantasy Football League.

That classic 90s footy/comedy crossover was also set in a mythical flat - although in this case David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were actually flatmates at the time - and several times an episode the doorbell would ring and they'd do a panto-style response - "I wonder who THAT could be" - while staggering up from the couch.

Every few years a channel's sport and comedy departments get together to try to replicate that show's success - sometimes by just bringing Fantasy Football League back, or variations on it - but rarely with much long-term impact. We'll have to wait and see whether this one proves a winner.