When Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton satirised media values in their Nineties sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey they produced a perceptive but gentle chiding of failing newsroom standards and most journalists loved it. They won't have found Hacks so funny.

The phone-hacking scandal is no media industry in-joke but an already much-publicised story of shameful events that the audience will have instantly recognised.

It was snappily written but it seems almost futile to try to exaggerate for comic effect the extreme methods that we know were actually employed at the News of the World. So when we saw Tabby, the pearl-wearing royal correspondent for the Sunday Comet, tasked with hacking the phone calls of the "Ginger Prince" we well knew the dapper Clive Goodman - her real life equivalent at the News of the World - was up to so much more.

Channel 4 ran the inevitable disclaimer: "The characters and events in this film are entirely fictitious." That may not have satisfied ex-staffers at the News of the World. Former showbiz editor Rav Singh and former investigations editor Mazher "The Fake Sheikh" Mahmood (neither of whom have been accused of criminal activity) can't have been impressed at the portrayal of the Sunday Comet's most scurrilous reporter Rav Musharraf (Kayvan Novak), who is shown trying to blag documents in the voices of Desmond Tutu, Sean Connery and Prince Philip ("just fax me the bleeding bank statement you imbecile").

Novak's was one of many slick performances. Claire Foy was scary as a ruthless editor with some of the ambitious traits of Rebekah Brooks. Michael Kitchen deftly played Stanhope Feast, a media baron with an Australian accent, a fruity vocabulary and a feisty young Oriental wife with a talent for close combat, Ho Chi Mao Feast (Eleanor Matsuura).

Hackgate has been such a gripping and multi-dimensional story that the hour-long drama rattled along at the pace of a good Sunday tabloid. And with the Leveson inquiry still unfolding, much of the material felt hot off the press. Scotland Yard should have squirmed at Russ Abbot's portrayal of a top cop and politicians were expertly lampooned for their obsequiousness towards the media.

But the Channel 4 audience, amused as it might have been by this all-too-real tale of tabloid excess, will have been left with little sense of the value of journalism. The role of other newspapers in exposing hacking was skipped over, leaving Ray (Phil Davis), a veteran reporter with an aversion to the dark arts, to represent Fleet Street's conscience.

Rupert Murdoch's influence on British media culture was mercilessly satirised. Hacks ended with an abandoned Stanhope Feast, hopping mad on his skyscraper helipad as the pages of his dead newspaper blew away in the wind. But the real life mogul is still worth more than $7bn and his News Corp empire generates $33bn a year in revenues, so that part at least was indeed entirely fictitious.

"This is the story of a British tabloid newspaper," says the on-screen message at the start of Hacks. "Obviously everything in it is made up." Then, for the next hour, Guy Jenkin's satirical look at you know which story chronicles recent events remarkably accurately. Not the boring bits - the most outrageous, and the most fun. It is fun. And very, very silly.

Claire Foy is properly good as the pushy moral vacuum of an editor. Kayvan Novak - Fonejacker turned phone hacker - is hilarious as an investigative reporter who specialises in the art of disguise and whose resemblance to a real investigative reporter who specialises in the art of disguise is obviously purely coincidental. Likewise Alexander Armstrong as "David Bullingdon", the posh twat who somehow gets to run the country. (From now on we must all refer to the PM as David Bullingdon, OK? And that includes you, Mr Miliband.)

But Guy Jenkin's master stroke is to give Wendy De ... sorry, "Ho Chi Mao Feast", the position at the heart of the story she clearly merits. Her brutal attack on the protester at the hearing - during which she repeatedly and ferociously bashes his head with her high heel until the blood spatters the select committee - is a joy.

Kayvan Novak looks as though he is having the time of his life playing the demented area manager Razz Prince. In between acting out his favourite movie scenes (complete with slo-mo sound effects) and making his assistant's life a misery, he offers Ashley and Jerwayne a chance to join the Elite Selling Krew, a shadowy team that may or may not actually exist. Meanwhile, Christopher, fed up with being the new kid, finds himself getting headhunted, while manager Lance wonders whether his empire is all about to fall apart.

It started life in 2003 as a blog by London ambulance technician Brian Kellett.

Back then, his musings on the job were entitled Random Acts of Reality. It became a book, Blood, Sweat and Tea, a radio play and now it's been turned into a TV series.

Even before it's aired here in Britain, an American version is already in the ­pipeline.

Written by Tony Basgallop, (Teachers, Hotel Babylon) this comedy drama is a strangely ­schizophrenic production.

On the one hand it seems to be straining to be a rude Channel 4 sitcom, filled with the usual quota of very bad language and sex scenes both gay and straight.

The opening line, "One female, mid-20s, looks like a slightly older Miley Cyrus...", played out against the medical drama cliche of slo-mo heroes and a lush ballad on the soundtrack, certainly leads you to expect the rest of the episode to be just as funny.

But it's also got a psychology ­textbook in its back pocket plus a brain and a conscience - three things that get in the way of comedy.

Our trio of paramedics, Stuart, Ashley and Rachid, played by Rhys Thomas, Richard Madden and Kayvan Novak, have attended a bad ­road-traffic accident and have been sent for counselling.

Warned of the mood swings that adrenaline coursing through their bodies will cause, Stuart decides to fight it - just to prove that he's more than a bunch of chemical reactions.

How much of tonight's first episode is based on real life is debatable, but it you want to wade through eight years of blogs to find out, then by all means, be my guest.

Sirens is a dire, dreary sitcom about three spectacularly charmless ambulance drivers.

Rhys Thomas of Bellamy's People and Fonejacker's Kayvan Novak are able comic performers, but they're all at sea in this virtually jokeless cauldron of mediocrity.

With its unedifying mix of crass sex jokes, gruesome imagery and ham-fisted "pathos", it's a tonal train-wreck. It's also stretched to breaking point at an hour, when its barren dialogue and slim plot (lazily derived from Seinfeld's infamous masturbation episode) couldn't sustain even half that time. If you're a young male who finds the very idea of turgidity amusing, knock yourself out. Otherwise, run for the hills.

Brrraapp. Can you hear the sirens coming? This is a clever Dizzee Rascal reference, that doesn't mean much but allows us to mention that Sirens can be added to the long list of TV shows that fail to use pop tunes that could have been created for their themes. Despite that Sirens is utterly brilliant. From the moment that Gary Bellamy begins his sweary narration (and turns off Angry Anderson to the final scene, it's terrific.

Billed comedy drama, which makes it sound like Cold Feet, it's about three people who work as paramedics and it's as dark as it gets, with humour that you imagine gets them through the awful mess that they work in the driving force. It's sweary, fun, sexy and bizarre. If we're splitting hairs, Gary Bellamy's performance is so understated it barely feels like he's there and Kayvan Novak still feels like he could be the best comic actor of his generation, if he just got on with it (stop dicking about with Facejacker Novak). But these are quibbles so minor, they're barely little quibblets. Just watch it.

Sirens looked promising on paper. Based on Tom Reynolds's popular blog, Random Acts of Reality, which wryly chronicled his time as an emergency response technician in the London Ambulance service, it stars three decent young actors - Rhys Thomas (from Bellamy's People), Kayvan Novak (Chris Morris's film Four Lions) and Richard Madden (Game of Thrones) - as cynical, laddish paramedics striving to treat their often harrowing work as just another day at the office. Unfortunately, it turns out to be one of those comedy-dramas that is neither funny nor dramatic. It combines Green Wing's irritating air of unreality with Skins's desperation to appear edgy, meaning that the banter just doesn't ring true, while the tediously frequent sexual encounters are even less believable.

Kayvan Novak faces up to random acts of reality

If the Four Lions star's US filming schedule wasn't tough enough, he's had to go out with ambulance crews in Leeds, and get rudely awoken by The Guardian.

Sirens cast interview

Rhys Thomas, Kayvan Novak and Richard Madden talk about filming Sirens...