Review: Doesn't compare favourably to Trigger Happy TV

Fool Britannia was broad, crass and very ITV. Has Dom Joly lost his funny bone?

Fool Britannia Review: A Joly Good Show? I Think Not...

The jokes were simple and immature in the worst sense, and I do wonder who would laugh at Dom Joly parking a New York City billboard in front of a man on a bench at Land's End.

Dom Joly nearly shot by the Mafia during filming

Prankster Dom Joly narrowly escaped being murdered by the Mafia while filming his new ITV1 show.

Dom Joly interview

He may be best-known for his hidden camera show, Trigger Happy TV, but Dom Joly is taking the genre to the next level with his new ITV1 prime-time entertainment series.

There's no getting around the fact that this is a monumental feast of backslapping: a two-hour, self-loving parade where Channel 4 tells itself just how wonderful and influential it is. Which is pretty insufferable if you think about it. Luckily for Channel 4, it does have a lot to cheer about.

This was the channel, after all, that gave us Green Wing and Spaced, Peep Show, Brass Eye and Father Ted. And we should be forever grateful to C4 for giving Harry Hill his TV debut with The Harry Hill Show (1997-99), which figures in the foothills of the top 30, voted for by members of the public.

Elsewhere Dom Joly, from Trigger Happy TV, bemoans the albatross of the giant mobile phone gags, where he yelled "HELLO!" into a fake mobile ("I really hate it [now]. I hate it with a passion uncontested. It's my Emu"), and Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer reveal they filmed their Big Night Out 20 minutes after leaving the pub.

A colourful collision of Mark Thomas and Dom Joly, this political hidden-camera prankathon is fact-packed, judiciously targeted, scarily well performed and, often, splutteringly funny.

The stars, Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse, set out to satirise tax avoidance, state violence, banker bailouts and other 21st-century injustices - their main weapon being sheer cojones. I was laughing and stuffing my fist in my mouth at the same time as they fired stupid questions at policemen mid-riot, tried to climb over MI6's front gate and, in the best sketch, proved that Tony Blair's central London mansion isn't as heavily guarded as it's cracked up to be.

There are shades of Chris Morris, Mark Thomas and Dom Joly in this new series, a politically skewed news and sketch-based satire. The programme-makers have already hit the headlines in a stunt when the Chancellor George Osborne was handed a GCSE book to help with his maths skills at a speech to bankers. Now seeking out corruption, greed and hypocrisy, Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein aim to humiliate and expose everyone from bankers and celebrities to Olympic organisers and tax-avoiding diplomats. Funny up to a point, even if you get the impression it's been done more artfully before.

Dom Joly on his new ITV show Fool Britannia

ITV have hired a Trigger Happy shooter to replace Bafta-winning Harry Hill's TV Burp.

After 10 years, this is the last run of this splendidly silly review of the week's TV. Against all odds, it's become one of ITV's most popular shows. Before TV Burp, Hill had a series on Channel 4, but was thought too odd for the mainstream, perhaps because of his routines involving puppet badgers named after minor celebrities (for example, "Tasmin Archer Badger").

At first, ITV1 dumped TV Burp into late-night slots. Not till the third series was repeated on Sunday teatimes did ITV1 realise it had a hit. From series four, TV Burp has been a fixture of Saturday teatimes. Audiences of eight million tuned in to see soap dialogue mocked, reality shows spoofed, and sequences so bizarre no other ITV show would attempt them. One week, Hill persuaded a dozen of TV's biggest stars to stare down the lens and say, in a puzzled tone, "Ear cataracts?" (It made sense at the time. Actually it didn't, but it was still funny.) Lately, though, Hill has wearied of watching 10 hours' TV a day, which is why he's quitting. In autumn, TV Burp will be replaced with a hidden camera show by Trigger Happy TV's Dom Joly. But who's funnier: Joly or Hill? "There's only one way to find out!"