This week the show it features not one, but two, token women!

Josie Lawrence and Sarah Millican join host Rob Brydon and team captains Lee Mack and David Mitchell to help sort fact from fiction.

Also in tonight's episode we hear about the evil eye expression Huw Edwards employs during interviews.

And former Corrie star, game-show host and corpser extraordinaire Bradley Walsh fails miserably to maintain a poker face tonight.

His story - involving the theft of some mashed potato - will be submitted to the show's usual ruthless scrutiny, cross-interrogation and lightning wit.

This is the third attempt to put JAM on the box, the BBC having done it previously in 1994 and 1999. Parsons and Merton appear in each episode, with guests appearing being Sue Perkins, Gyles Brandreth, Stephen Fry, Liza Tarbuck, Graham Norton, Josie Lawrence and Julian Clary. There are also a fair number of new contestants: Jason Manford, Miles Jupp, Ruth Jones, Phill Jupitus, John Sergeant and Russell Tovey.

The format is the same, but there are some obvious changes; for a start, there's no scorer sitting next to Parsons. Instead he just has the scores on a screen, and the clock is started by a large button next to him. There's also a little bell rang to indicate they are moving into the final round.

Some things do remain the same, though. The studio is designed to look like the art deco BBC Radio Theatre, where the radio series is normally recorded. For some reason, however, the studio lights change from blue to purple when the subjects start. Why they need to do this I have no idea. I find the camerawork even more irritating. There's no need to cut from here to there every three seconds.

However, there's still much to enjoy from this show. I for one enjoy the little amusing asides that go through out each episodes. My personal favourite was in the fourth episode when the panel kept making jokes about Miles Jupp being the supposed love child of Gyles Brandreth. The jokes just kept snowballing throughout.

With regards to the TV adaptation, I know that there will always be people who will insist that it's not as good as the one on radio, but there are always people who complain about TV adaptations of radio shows. If we rejected every TV adaptation of a radio adaptation out of hand we wouldn't have had the TV successes of shows like Whose Line is it Anyway? or Little Britain.

I'd love to see more episodes of the TV version of Just a Minute; but I doubt they'll produce them. Unless they want to celebrate the show's 50th anniversary, that is, and given that Parsons is 88 years old that might be a bit dangerous.

If you prefer your comedy straight up this week's Just a Minute sees panellists Tony Hawks, Josie Lawrence, Justin Moorhouse and Dave Gorman at Derby University this week, talking about mature students, Derby, paying off student loans and Zanzibar (which happens to be the name of the student bar in Derby). The players' verbal dexterity is amusing, but it's their petty squabbling and Nicholas Parsons's exasperation that provide the belly laughs. And if this show doesn't snap you out of the January blues, there's probably no helping you until spring arrives.

Much, but not all, of the humour is rooted in the culture of 1980s Britain, the rise of the yuppie class, the dissatisfaction with Thatcher's Britain and other issues of the day. But the humour isn't all political: there's some broad physical humour courtesy of Lee Evans and Josie Lawrence provides some character-based monologues that satirise the world of television and celebrity.

A couple of the sketches fall flat, however, there are also some real strokes of comic genius too.

The only drawback to this second series of improvised comedy recorded in front of an audience is the same as the drawback to the first - you can't see Josie Lawrence. One supposes that there will be those similarly bereft at not having the full-on Jim Sweeney experience either.

That quibble aside, improv fans can tune in confident that the quality remains extremely high as the two riff off suggestions from the audience, adopting a variety of outrageous accents and doing their best to make the other corpse. Cheap entertainment at its finest - and no musical segments, either. Bonus.

It takes a brave pair to do improv in front of a raucous crowd. But Josie Lawrence and Jim Sweeney have more than enough credentials, characters and convincing accents to calculate the risk in Radio 4's favour.